Author: Alexandra Bell
Date: 2025-10-28 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Historical; Romance; Mystery; Adult
Description: Journey to a magical hotel in the Swiss Alps, where two lost souls living in different centuries meet and discover that behind its many doors, they may just find a second chance. ‘Have you travelled a long way?’ she asked carefully. A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘Well, yes,” he said slowly. ‘Yes, you could say that. But it was worth the wait.’ London, 2015 When reclusive art appraiser Eve Shaw shakes the hand of a silver-haired gentleman in her London office, the warmth of his palm sends a spark through her. His name is Max Everly – curiously, the same name as Eve’s favourite co
Publisher: Del Rey

BY ALEXANDRA BELL

The White Octopus Hotel

Frozen Charlotte

Frozen Charlotte

Charlotte Says

Lex Trent

Lex Trent Versus the Gods

Lex Trent: Fighting with Fire

The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club series

The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club

Explorers on Witch Mountain

Explorers on Black Ice Bridge

The Ocean Squid Explorers’ Club

Explorers at Pirate Island

Explorers at Stardust City

A Train of Dark Wonders adventures

The Train of Dark Wonders

The Hunt for the Cursed Unicorn

Escape from the Castle of Illusions

The Winter Garden

The Ninth Circle

Jasmyn

The Haunting

Music and Malice in Hurricane Town

A Most Peculiar Toy Factory

The Lighthouse

The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts

Del Rey

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Copyright © 2025 by Alexandra Bell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bell, Alex

Title: The White Octopus Hotel / Alexandra Bell.

Description: New York : Del Rey, 2025.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025023645 (print) | LCCN 2025023646 (ebook) | ISBN 9798217091799 trade paperback acid-free paper | ISBN 9798217091805 ebook

Subjects: LCGFT: Fiction | Paranormal romance fiction | Novels Classification: LCC PR6102.E435 W48 2025 (print) | LCC PR6102.E435 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20250604

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025023645

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025023646

Ebook ISBN 9798217091805

Book team: Production editor: Jennifer Rodriguez • Managing editor: Paul Gilbert • Production manager: Jane Haas Sankner • Copy editor: Aja Pollock • Proofreaders: Andrea Gordon, Claire Maby, Melissa Churchill

Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

Cover design and illustration: Holly Macdonald

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland. https://eu-contact.penguin.ie
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Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Acknowledgements

About the Author

_153595794_

For my mum, Shirley Bell, for all the wisdom,
friendship, loyalty, and love.

And for my husband, Neil Dayus, who always makes me feel like the best and truest version of myself.

Chapter 1

Eve—August 2015

Eve didn’t want to turn around because then she would see it. The monster. Of course, she’d laid eyes on it before, many times over the years, but there were some things you never got used to, some horrors you would do anything to avoid. It was a child’s nightmare—yet here was Eve, twenty-seven years old today, and the monster was still chasing her. It didn’t come every day, not anymore, but it never missed a birthday.

Eve kept her head down as she hurried towards the escalator that led to the Underground. She caught the train just as it pulled away from the platform, and for a moment she hoped she might have lost it in the crowds. But then she looked up and there it was on the seat opposite, the monster that was shaped like a rabbit. A rabbit, of course, had no business being there in the middle of the London Underground, especially not a rabbit like that. It was white and fluffy, with a splodge of black over one eye. It should have been terrified of all the noise and commotion. It should have been running around in circles, trying to hide, trying to find a way out. Yet it just sat there on the seat, perfectly calm, staring at Eve with warm, friendly eyes as she trembled.

The train jolted and rattled its way to her stop, and she tried not to look at the monster, or to dwell on the fact that no one else in the crowded carriage was aware of the creature at all. Finally, the train reached her platform and she got off, but the rabbit followed. It always followed. Every time she glanced back, there it was, hopping and bouncing happily in her wake, right onto the escalator.

Eve dug her nails into her palms. Eventually, she knew, the rabbit would go away. The trick was to keep her eyes locked ahead until it did, to stay busy, to continue as normal. She walked briskly along the pavement, trying not to look at the long-eared shadow nearby. Her hands were still shaking as she slipped her earphones in and began playing a piece of music by her favourite composer. Max Everly had lived and died many decades before she was born, but there was something about his music that Eve always found comforting, even on her most difficult days. She’d discovered Everly at nineteen, and on those occasions when despair and shame threatened to reach out their claws and drag her back down into the pit, Everly’s music was a fierce flame that pushed away the shadows and the sorrows.

She did her best now to focus on the music as she walked to Stanley’s auction house. It was sunny, just like it had been all those years ago. Eve always hoped for rain on her birthday, but the August date meant that rarely happened. For a moment, she could see the bounce and sway of balloons, and smell the sausage rolls and strawberry jelly. When she reached the auction house, she paused outside to take a deep breath and try to still the tremor in her hands. Perhaps she should have taken leave, like last year, but she also couldn’t stand the idea of another day sitting in her flat by herself with her rabbits and ghosts….

When she put her earphones back in her bag, she noticed that the rabbit had gone—for now, at least. Once inside the auction house, she could throw herself into her role as a valuer—work that she enjoyed—and there would be some structure to her day. She was planning to spend the entire morning cataloguing a collection of paintings that had just come in and then writing up valuation reports for the client. They would be quiet, methodical tasks. Exactly what she needed.

She made a start as soon as she reached her office, glad of the air-conditioning. It was far too hot to be wearing a black turtleneck, but it was what she always wore. It was simpler that way. Less chance of a stray tentacle wandering onto her neck and causing any consternation or alarm to anyone who might see it. Less chance of any ink raising questions. Besides, it was irritating to be screamed at. Life was much easier when she wore black and kept people at a distance.

She worked diligently and without interruption until eleven o’clock. It was a relief to look up and see the time. A couple of hours down, and she’d hardly noticed them. Perhaps the day wouldn’t be quite so bad as she feared. Perhaps she could get through it mostly unscathed….

But then her mobile rang, and her heart juddered painfully. This was the worst part of the day, and she briefly considered letting it go to answerphone. How she longed to do just that, to pretend she’d been busy in a meeting, or on the other line, but if her mother had the courage to make the call, then Eve must have the courage to answer it. She’d been crouched on the floor beside a painting, but now she stood up, swiped her thumb across the screen, and raised the phone to her ear. “Hello.”

She couldn’t make her voice sound normal, no matter how hard she tried. It came out as a dry croak, like she was hungover or half asleep.

“Eve. It’s Mum.”

“I know. Hi.” She swallowed hard, tried to force some normality into her voice. “How are you?”

She regretted her words instantly. For a moment, there was utter silence on the other end of the line. Eve wondered if her mother might simply hang up, but instead she cleared her throat and said, “I just called to say happy birthday.”

Eve slipped her free hand into her pocket, her fingers searching for the fumsup. She was reassured by the feel of its lumpy wooden head beneath her fingers and the way it helped ground her in the moment. She was right here, at work. She wasn’t back there. At the party. Her eye fell on the window, and she saw a balloon go floating past—impossibly purple. Perhaps the most purple thing she had ever laid eyes on. A child must have let go of it on the pavement outside, she told herself. That’s all it was.

“Eve?” Her mum’s voice came over the line. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here.” The words made a hot flush of guilt prickle over her skin.

She was here. Her sister, Bella, was not. She desperately searched her mind for something, anything, to say to her mum but couldn’t think of a single sentence that wouldn’t make it all worse. The fact was that they hardly knew each other anymore. Eve spoke to her mother perhaps twice a year. It was impossible, at times like this, not to think of how things might have been different between them, how everything might have been different if it weren’t for that single moment twenty-three years ago. One mistake that had changed everything and left their family in shreds.

“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,” her mum said. “I’m sure you’re very busy. Take care.”

“Bye, Mum,” Eve rasped.

But the call had already ended. She dropped the phone and the fumsup onto her desk. She was too hot again, and since there was no one else there, she took the risk of rolling her sleeves to her elbows and went to the window. The glass was cold as she rested her clammy forehead against it. Then she saw the black cab draw up to the curb.

The passenger door opened, and an elderly man struggled out, leaning heavily on his cane. He was smartly dressed, in a charcoal-coloured herringbone suit and fedora hat. The clothes were old-fashioned, but he looked as if he had taken pains to dress in his best. She wondered who he was going to meet and what for. A happy occasion, she hoped.

He stood, wobbling slightly on the pavement, and the taxi drove away as he headed towards the auction house. There were only a few steps up to the front door, but Eve could see how difficult they were for him, and how he stopped to catch his breath after each one. She wished someone would offer to help, but people didn’t really help people they didn’t know, did they? Eve wouldn’t have offered if she’d been down there—because, after all, perhaps the man could manage perfectly well, and such an offer would be patronizing and offensive to him. Besides which, people like Eve didn’t help old people up steps. Bella probably would have helped, Eve supposed. If she’d been alive.

Everyone loves Bella, she could hear nonexistent friends saying. She’s so bubbly, so vivacious, so lovely.

All things that Eve was not. Soon enough, the old man had disappeared through the revolving doors, and Eve returned to her paintings.

A short while later, there was a knock and her secretary, James, looked into the office as Eve hastily yanked her sleeves back down to her wrists.

“Hi. Sorry to interrupt, I know you’re busy, but there’s a man here to see you.”

Eve was surprised. “I don’t have any appointments today.”

“That’s what I told him, but he’s…well, he’s really insistent. He’s brought something in to be valued and he says he’ll only speak to you.”

Eve frowned. “What’s his name?”

“Max Everly.”

She felt a jolt of shock pass through her. “Like the composer?”

James shrugged. “I guess so.”

James probably wouldn’t have known who Max Everly was if it hadn’t been for the suitcase. Old and battered, it had turned up at this very auction house, full of sheet music for never-before-heard songs written by Everly—whose existing body of work had all been composed before 1935. It was one of the reasons Eve had always wanted to work at Stanley’s—in the hopes that another such suitcase might appear. The compositions were swiftly verified by experts and their discovery created a big stir in the music world. Eve had been glad because it meant more people got to hear the music she had always loved so fiercely.

She heard it ringing in her head again now—the songs that she had played so many times, the ones that acted as a lifeline, tethering her to the world when she was in danger of floating away. She knew her mystery visitor couldn’t be the composer since he had been born in 1899 and would have been one hundred and sixteen by now.

“He’s, um, he’s quite frail,” James said tentatively. “I think it was an effort for him to get here.”

Eve recalled the elderly man she’d seen on the steps outside earlier. It could only be him, surely.

“He said it was important,” James went on. “And he promised he wouldn’t take up more than ten minutes of your time.”

Her secretary didn’t look at all hopeful that she would agree to see him. Eve had once overheard James refer to her as the Black Widow in the staff room, while chatting to their colleague Kate. She supposed this was a reference to the fact that she always dressed in black and didn’t chat much, never going out for after-work drinks or attending Christmas parties. She knew the other staff thought her cold and unfriendly. Perhaps she was cold and unfriendly, although she didn’t particularly mean to be. She was the kind of woman who was forever being asked whether she ever smiled.

Kate had laughed at the Black Widow remark. “Personally, she always makes me think of Miss Scarlett. You know, from Cluedo?”

“Miss Scarlett is a blonde,” Eve had remarked from her chair, which was hidden behind the door. Eve’s hair was jet-black and cut short in a sharp bob. Her eyes were different colours too—one blue and one green.

James and Kate had both looked appalled to see her there, but just because her colleagues had cast her in the role of femme fatale, that didn’t mean it was who she was deep down. It cost her nothing to see this old man for a few moments, and she had liked his hat, so she said, “Show him in.”

She tried not to notice or mind James’s look of surprise. He left the room and soon returned with the unexpected visitor, ushering him over the threshold before giving Eve a nod and closing the door. It was, indeed, the same person she’d seen on the street. He looked to be in his late seventies and had removed his hat to reveal thin wisps of silvery hair combed neatly back from his forehead. His shoulders were rounded, and he hunched forwards over his stick, his gaze directed towards the floor as he shuffled in with slow, careful steps. Eve came around her desk to greet him. Even with his stoop, he was quite a bit taller than her.

“Good morning, sir. I’m Eve Shaw.” She’d expected there to be a painting, as these were her specialty, but there was no sign of any wrapped package under his arm. In fact, he didn’t appear to be carrying anything at all. She held out her hand and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Max Everly paused for a moment before reaching out to take her hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip, and the warmth of his palm sent a little spark of something through Eve. She felt, for the strangest moment, like she’d been here before, meeting this man before, holding his hand before. He was staring down at her fingers, clasped in his, and she felt a tremor pass through his palm.

“The pleasure,” he said quietly, “is all mine.”

He raised his head, meeting her gaze for the first time, and Eve found herself looking into brown eyes, dark and rich and deep, and the strangest thing was that even though she knew this man couldn’t possibly be the musician from the 1930s, in that moment his eyes seemed startlingly like the ones she’d seen in the black-and-white photographs of the composer from all those years ago. Not only that, but she was sure she saw a flash of recognition in this elderly man’s gaze too. She had the sudden conviction not only that he recognised her, but that he knew her, and that she must, therefore, in turn know him. A gasp caught in the back of his throat and his hand tightened around hers.

“Hello, Eve,” he breathed.

Suddenly, her feeling of knowing him evaporated, and it was a stranger who stood before her. He seemed reluctant to let go of her hand, and when he stepped closer, Eve sensed that he meant to embrace her. She automatically took a step back. She wasn’t a hugger and was relieved when Max let go of her hand.

“Forgive me,” he said, a little breathlessly. “You…you remind me of someone I used to know, that’s all. My name is Max Everly. Thank you for meeting with me. I appreciate your time.”

“Not at all,” she said briskly. “Please take a seat.” She waved towards the comfortable armchairs facing her desk. “Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

“Coffee, thank you. Black. One sugar.”

She walked over to the coffee pod machine on a table in the corner and made their drinks. She set one down in front of her guest and then took her seat opposite him behind the desk.

“So, what can I help you with, Mr. Everly? James said you had something for me to value?”

“Please,” he replied. “Call me Max.”

He reached for the coffee cup, and Eve noticed the liver spots on the backs of his hands, and the boniness of his knees where they pressed against the fabric of his trousers. Yet there was a glint of something warm and almost mischievous in his eyes, an echo of the younger man he’d once been. Eve had the sense that, unlike herself, this was someone who had smiled and laughed often.

“That’s a curious little fellow,” he said, nodding at the fumsup charm on Eve’s desk.

“Curious” was one word for it. Eve had always thought the fumsup had a bit of a creepy look, with its jointed metal body, overlarge wooden head, and white glass eyes, but she liked it no less for that.

“It’s a good-luck charm,” she said. “They were sent out to soldiers during the First World War.”

“And how did you come by yours?” Max asked.

“I…” Eve trailed off, recalling the childhood dream she’d once had that a magician had given it to her, but the truth was that she didn’t know where it had come from. “I can’t remember. I’ve just always had it. I suppose I found it somewhere.”

“I suppose you did.” He leaned forwards a little. “You know, sometimes the end is also the beginning.”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.”

“Have you travelled a long way?” she asked carefully. She was starting to wonder whether he was quite all there.

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Well, yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, you could say that. But it was worth the wait.”

“How did you happen to come across my name?” Eve asked. “It’s just that I normally specialise in valuing paintings, you see, so—”

“Do you not think,” Max interrupted, looking at her closely, “that it’s high time you stopped valuing paintings and started producing some masterpieces of your own?”

Was he trying to make a joke? If so, Eve couldn’t bring herself to laugh. But beneath the fabric of her black jeans, the octopus tattoo on her thigh began to burn upon her skin.

“I’m not sure that I follow,” she said. “Are you looking to have something commissioned? This is an auction house; we don’t create new work here.”

“That’s a pity.” Max set his coffee cup down. “But no matter. The reason I came here was to give you this.”

He reached into his trousers pocket and gently set an object on the desk between them. It was a small, ornamental octopus.

Chapter 2

Eve stared at the octopus. It was pearly white, with long tentacles sprawled around it, elegant and strange. The very tip of one tentacle was black, like it had been dipped in ink. There was a small hook on top of its head, as if it had once been attached to something else. Its eyes were ancient and wise. Her thigh burned worse than ever. The tentacles tattooed onto her skin were of her own design and almost identical to the ornament in front of her.

Suddenly, Eve was no longer in the auction house at all, but back home, surrounded by dozens of her sketchbooks, the pages all full of octopus drawings. Over the years, she had filled up volume after volume with twisting tentacles and giant, staring eyes. And every single octopus had one tentacle with a black tip. It was such an unusual detail that she was shocked to see it in the ornament before her now.

She’d never tried to turn any of her sketches into paintings—though she had thought about it, had longed to do it—and she’d never shown them to anyone, ever. Yet she couldn’t get away from the feeling that Max Everly knew about them somehow, that he knew about all those sketchbooks neatly stacked up at home, and the fact that octopuses both fascinated and delighted her. When she met his eye, she was almost certain that his gaze flicked, just once, towards her thigh, as if he knew about the tattoo too.

“Some sorrows seem like too much for any one person to bear,” he said softly. “I know all about that. But there is light to be found as well, I promise you.”

Eve shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to find her way back to a normal conversation. “I don’t understand. Is this the item you were hoping to have valued?”

“Oh no, I’m not interested in valuing it. I doubt it’s worth much. Please,” he said, “take it as a gift.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“It’s for you,” Max insisted. “It was always meant for you.”

There was a sudden catch in his voice, and Eve was startled to see that he was blinking back tears. She was sure now that he must have escaped from a retirement home or something. There was probably a group of worried carers out searching for him.

“It’s very kind of you, really,” she began firmly. “But we have policies here, and I can’t accept any gifts from clients.”

“I’m not your client.”

“Even so, I can’t—”

“You must!” he cried. For the first time since walking in, he looked a little unsure of himself, a little desperate. “You already have. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Now you have to do your part.”

“All right,” Eve said, speaking quickly because he was starting to sound quite distressed. Perhaps the best thing to do was to play along. “All right. It’s very kind of you and I’m sorry, I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”

He took a deep breath. “Everyone should have something on their birthday.”

“It’s just that…Wait. How do you know it’s my—?”

“Thank you for seeing me.”

Max gripped his stick and used the edge of the desk to drag himself to his feet. Eve rose too. She wished James had never let the man into her office.

“I’ll walk you out,” she said, picking up the octopus and slipping it into her pocket. Perhaps she could toss it into the taxi after him.

“There’s really no need,” Max said, but without much conviction. “I’m sure I can find my own way.”

“I was going out to buy a sandwich anyway,” Eve lied. “And perhaps I might flag down a taxi for you? Unless you’d like me to phone someone?”

“My dear,” he said with that half smile, “there is no one to call.”

Eve didn’t know what to say to that, so they left the room and walked down the corridor to the lift in silence. But as the doors closed behind them Eve realised that something was wrong. Max had suddenly lost all the colour from his face; his breathing was too shallow and his hands were trembling.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“There is so much,” he said, his voice quivering. “So very much that I would like to say to you. But it’s all…” He waved a hand. “It’s already been said.”

Eve’s gaze went to the numbers counting down at the top of the lift; she willed them to go faster. When the doors finally slid open on the ground floor, she tried to persuade Max to take a seat in the lobby, but he insisted on heading to the exit.

“I want to be outside…,” he said breathlessly.

His words made Eve shiver. She had a sudden foreboding that something bad was about to take place. She followed him as he lurched unsteadily out onto the steps, sucking in a deep lungful of air.

“Can I help you down the stairs?” she asked, reaching towards him.

He met her gaze and smiled. The smile lit up his face, and suddenly there seemed to be so much humour, and wit, and life in his eyes. So much joy.

“I’d prefer you to go back inside, but I know you won’t. So, yes. I would appreciate your help this one last time.”

It was an odd reply, but then so much of what he’d said made no sense. There was no time to linger on any of it, however—although Eve would replay his words many times in the weeks that followed. But in that moment, she simply took his arm, feeling how thin and frail it was through the fabric of his smart jacket. She heard his knees click as she helped him down one step, then another.

“Your hat,” she said, suddenly remembering that he must have left it in the cloakroom. “Shall I run back and—?”

But she didn’t finish the sentence before Max gave a sudden, sharp cry of pain. His walking stick fell from his grip to clatter down the steps and he leaned forwards, clutching a hand to his chest. Then his legs buckled, and he was dragging Eve down with him.

She shouted up to the doorman, who hurriedly got out a phone to call for an ambulance. All around, people were stopping and staring. Some came to see if they could help, but there was nothing anyone could do except wait. Eve knelt on the steps by Max’s side, holding his hand in hers. Even to her untrained eye, she could tell this was bad. His face was white and etched with lines of pain, his breathing a shallow gasp.

“The ambulance is coming,” she said helplessly. “It’s going to be okay.”

To her surprise, Max gave the smallest of smiles. “I know.”

She looked at his face and thought his eyes had a glassy look, as if he wasn’t really seeing her at all. “Promise you’ll come back to the hotel,” he said, his voice slurring slightly. “Please.”

There was such a look of hungry desperation in his eyes that Eve nodded, even though she knew he was speaking to someone else, from some time long ago. He must have regained some lucidity right at the end, though, because he used her name when he spoke again, for the final time.

“Thank you, Eve.” His hand tightened briefly around hers. “For saving me.”

She tried to offer some stumbling reply, but it was already too late. His hand was limp, and the life and light had gone from his eyes, which were now empty and unseeing. She knew, even before the paramedics arrived shortly afterwards and confirmed it, that the person Max Everly had been was gone forever. He was pronounced dead at the scene, shortly after midday. Eve hadn’t known him—they’d barely exchanged a few dozen words—yet she felt very sad as she let go of his frail hand and watched him being loaded onto the stretcher.

It occurred to her, too, that this would do nothing whatsoever to help dispel the Black Widow nickname she’d gained at work.

Chapter 3

France—One Year Later

Eve walked through the market, trying to ignore the rabbit hopping along behind her. Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to get the ferry to St. Malo a few days ago. She’d hoped that being abroad might make her birthday easier. The market was nothing like the antiques ones she often went to back home. In fact, it was little more than a flea market, full of bric-a-brac, and knitted cardigans, and secondhand books. Eve didn’t really expect to find anything of interest there, but it was something to do, something to look at.

She’d found herself thinking of Max Everly several times today, too. The episode last year had been as strange as it was sad. Eve had never seen anyone die before. It was the one small mercy when it came to her sister. She’d thought about trying to track down his next of kin in case they wanted the octopus back, but she hadn’t known where to start. The hospital had found no identification on him and the only reason the medics even knew his name was because Eve had given it to them. It made her sad to think of him being buried alone.

There was the hat too—the fedora Eve had collected from the cloakroom. It was old and shabby, at odds with the smart suit he’d been wearing. The initials ME had been written on the label inside, along with a single musical note inked in one corner. Once again, Eve found it impossible not to be struck by the coincidence of this man sharing a name with her favourite composer. It seemed wrong to throw the hat away, but there was no one to claim it, so she’d taken it home, along with the octopus.

She’d tried googling Max Everly in the hopes of locating his family, but the fact that he shared a name with such a famous composer made that impossible. Her searches only returned information about the Everly from the 1900s. She ran her eyes over the handful of photographs she knew so well—a headshot of seventeen-year-old Everly in his lieutenant’s uniform, just before he set off to war; some pictures taken at musical performances, along with a couple snapped at glamorous-looking parties. Black-haired and handsome, with dark eyes that were almost magnetic. Eve had had a bit of a crush on him when she’d first discovered his music as a teenager. “Crush” was the wrong word, though. More of an obsession, really. But there was something about the photos that always made her feel a bit shivery too. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d disappeared sometime in 1935, and nobody ever found out what became of him. It seemed so wrong for there never to have been an answer. One day, he simply stepped out of the world and was gone, off to join the Missing Persons’ Club with Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, and the crew of the Mary Celeste. A disappearance made all the more mysterious by the fact that the suitcase full of music had turned up sixty-five years later.

The octopus ornament the modern-day Max Everly had given her wasn’t valuable, although Eve liked it very much. In fact, she loved it. It was like seeing one of her drawings brought to life. Right now, it was sitting on her bedside table back home, and she was thinking about it at the very moment she rounded a corner of the street market in France and found herself face-to-face with the teacups.

The stall in front of her held an assortment of china, including a tea service in a striking lavender-grey colour, all stamped with a white octopus crest. It was identical to the creature back home on her bedside table. It even had the same black tip on one tentacle. Eve walked over and asked the stallholder in her stumbling French whether she might examine the set. This was not her field of expertise, but she could tell at a glance that the tea service was decades old and that it was of superb quality. Names like Limoges and Sèvres went through her mind, but when she carefully picked up a plate, she found no relevant marks on the back.

It was still exquisitely beautiful but all in quite bad condition. The sugar bowl was chipped and so were some of the plates. The handle of the milk jug had broken sometime in the past and been glued back on. Most of the teacups were damaged, and the teapot was missing altogether. It might have been worth something if it had been better preserved, but Eve doubted it was valuable in its current condition. Even so, she couldn’t stop staring at the teacup in her hands. She asked the stallholder where the items had come from, but the response she received was too rapid for her to follow. There was one word she did recognise, though—hôtel.

Come back to the hotel….

She recalled Max’s words, hearing his voice as clearly as if he was standing beside her in the market.

She tried to ask for more information, but the stallholder’s reply was more impatient this time. “Hotel closed,” she said curtly in English.

It was clear she wanted to turn her attention to the other prospective customers gathering at the stall, so Eve took out her wallet and asked how much she wanted for the tea service. A short while later, she walked away with the pieces hastily wrapped and bundled into a couple of supermarket carrier bags. When she got back to her room, she spent some time examining the china from every angle, turning it over and over in her hands, marvelling at the beauty of the octopus and the strangeness of the coincidence.

When she returned to work after her trip, she took one of the teacups with her to show Kate. Ever since that Miss Scarlett comment, the other woman had avoided Eve whenever she could, but chinaware was her specialty, so Eve was determined to pin her down.

“It’s not a brand I recognise, I’m afraid,” Kate told her. “It was probably made by one of the smaller regional factories in France. It’s beautiful but not worth much.”

“And its background?” Eve asked. “The stallholder seemed to think it had come from a hotel.”

Kate shrugged and handed the teacup back. “That doesn’t really narrow it down much, although it’s…Wait, can I take another look?”

Eve passed it over and Kate examined it again. “There’s an auction house myth,” she finally said. “A bit of auctioneer’s lore, really. About a place called the White Octopus Hotel. You’ve never heard of it?”

Eve shook her head.

“My mentor told me the story when I first started here. You remember Victor Harris? Lovely man. He retired a few years ago now. He said there was meant to be this beautiful hotel called the White Octopus that was famous in its day for containing various magical objects.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Magical objects?”

Kate nodded. “Clocks that could rewind time, a telephone that let you speak with someone who’d died, things like that. Real fantasy stuff. I thought Victor was just making it up to be amusing, but I’ve since heard the story from other people too. The hotel supposedly closed under mysterious circumstances and the contents were sold off, scattered through various auction houses across Europe. It’s just a fairy tale, of course.”

Eve didn’t have a particularly hard time believing that fairy tales might be real. Monsters were, after all. And ghosts. Life could be strange and unexpected sometimes; she was well enough aware of that. The octopus tattoo tingled on her skin. It was on her collarbone today, perilously close to being visible. Fortunately, it hardly ever strayed onto her face, so the turtleneck and long sleeves were usually enough to keep it hidden. Even so, she was just thinking she ought to leave when she felt a tentacle flick casually over the top of her turtleneck. Unfortunately, Kate’s eyes were drawn by the movement too, making her jump.

“What was…?” she began.

Eve quickly clamped her hand over her neck and stood up. “Thank you for your time.”

“Of…of course.”

Eve picked up the teacup and quickly returned to her own office. She hoped Kate wouldn’t say anything about the tentacle, but it had only been a momentary flash; she probably hadn’t even seen it properly. And it wasn’t as if anyone would believe her anyway. Tattoos didn’t move around a person’s body. Everyone knew that.

Eve set the octopus teacup on the desk and switched on her computer. When she typed “the White Octopus Hotel” into Google and hit the search button, she expected there to be nothing at all, but then the results appeared on the screen, and the headlines all shared the same theme.

The White Octopus and other abandoned hotels…

Uncertainty over future of landmark White Octopus…

Home of renowned painter Nikolas Roth crumbling into ruin…

Eve stared at that last headline. She’d learned about Nikolas Roth at university and knew that he had been a renowned Victorian painter, beloved by critics of the day, who had praised his art as dark and powerful, fascinating, ahead of its time. His paintings were much sought after by private art collectors, but it seemed that no one could get their hands on an original Roth painting, no matter how high a price they offered. Nikolas Roth was an eccentric recluse who shied away from interviews and rarely left his home in the Swiss Alps. Not only did he refuse to sell his paintings, or loan them to museums, but he strictly banned all photographers from his private exhibitions too.

The only place he was known to have displayed his art was on the walls of his hotel. So, throughout the years, forbidden photographs would sometimes appear, claiming to have captured a Roth painting in situ. Most of these were dismissed as hoaxes and fakes, but there was one photo, taken in 1927, that modern-day scholars thought could be genuine. It was too blurred and grainy to make out any details of the painting properly and it didn’t show the whole canvas either—just a small part of it, along with a man stood nearby, whom many believed to be Roth himself. He was tall, grey-haired, and dressed in a well-cut suit, but you couldn’t see his face because it was angled away from the camera.

Upon his death in the 1930s, his collection of paintings all mysteriously vanished. Eve had always nurtured the vague hope that perhaps, one day, a Roth painting might find its way to the auction house, just as Max Everly’s music had. What a find that would be.

She clicked on the link that referenced the painter and found herself on an art history website. There was no mention of any magical objects, but the piece detailed the fact that Nikolas Roth had lived and worked in his family home in the mountains, which had also been open to the public at the turn of the century as a lakeside hotel called the White Octopus.

During the era of “grand hotels,” the White Octopus was known as the most beautiful example of belle époque architecture in Switzerland. The pearl-coloured stonework, iron balconies, and asymmetrical turrets had a fairy-tale quality befitting the beauty of its lakeside location.

In its heyday, the thirty-six rooms at the hotel were much sought after, with guests eager to partake of the celebrated afternoon teas on the veranda, restore their health in the exquisitely tiled steam baths, and take a turn about the famous Fountain Room at sunset. Today, there is little remaining of the splendour that once flourished here, and it seems Roth’s former home is destined to crumble into ruin….

Eve scrolled down to continue reading the article, but it was broken up with a photo of the hotel. It depicted a truly beautiful building—more castle than mansion—with elegant white spires piercing a deep-blue sky. A crystal-clear lake sparkled in the foreground and mountain peaks rose majestically on the horizon, but Eve couldn’t take her eyes from the hotel itself. She recognised it at once. It was like suddenly seeing the face of a very old and very dear friend, unexpectedly, after many years apart. She felt a sudden powerful wave of gladness and nostalgia, mixed with an inexplicable sense of homesickness and loss. She’d been to this hotel before.

Chapter 4

Eve couldn’t pinpoint when exactly she had visited the White Octopus, but it must have been when she was very small. A family holiday, perhaps, before Bella died and it all went wrong. Eve never talked about those years with her parents. Even when she’d lived at home, it was a rule that they never, ever spoke about the time before, not a word. But Eve remembered snippets sometimes—pleasant outings to feed ducks on a pond, or riding the bus into town to buy new shoes, or filling a paper bag with sweets in a sugar-scented shop full of jars. There had been normal, happy moments…at least for a little while.

And surely, they must have gone on holiday to Switzerland one year and stayed at this hotel. When Eve searched her mind for details, she could practically hear the tinkling notes of a pianist playing in the lobby, and smell the icy-fresh peppermint creams served on silver plates during afternoon tea, and see the sparkle of the sun setting over the emerald lake.

But then she clicked on a few more links and learned that the hotel had closed its doors for good on 27th November 1935, during the famed “last party.” Over fifty years before her birth. She frowned. If the hotel had been closed all this time, then she couldn’t possibly have visited. The article explained that guests and staff alike had all left on the same night, leaving undrunk coupes of champagne in the ballroom and half-smoked cigarettes in the cigar lounge. There was a game of chess frozen halfway through a match in the library and wooden cues discarded partway through a game in the billiards room. Everything just seemed to be put down where it was.

Headlines speculated that something strange must have happened at the hotel that night. Why else would everyone get up and leave in the middle of a party? Especially when it was cold and snowing outside, and miles to the nearest town. There were even rumours of guests abandoning their fur coats in the cloakroom. But the mystery was never explained, and the hotel didn’t reopen. It seemed that it was located in an area of the Alps that fell out of favour with tourists, and no investor was ever found with deep enough pockets to bring the hotel back to life. It was a peculiar story, and Eve recognised that parts of it had clearly been embellished and made fantastical beyond belief. It was intriguing to think that her tea set might once have graced the hotel’s veranda, though.

In the days and weeks that followed, Eve couldn’t get the place out of her mind. She found herself reading about the hotel in her spare moments and looking at photos online. She became distracted at work, unable to concentrate on the paintings in front of her. Even her dreams were filled with champagne parties and white tentacles.

She’d wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep for thinking about the hotel. She drew the building in her sketchbooks over and over again. And then she drew the rooms as she imagined them to be—a mixture of Cluedo-style mansion and dark fairy-tale castle. She couldn’t shake the conviction that she had been to the White Octopus, even though she knew it was impossible. She went back through her dozens of sketchbooks, the pages filled with gigantic eyes and elegant tentacles that spilled across the pages, all with that single black tip.

One rainy Sunday afternoon, while following various virtual rabbit warrens online for information about the hotel, she came across an expired listing for an item that had been sold at another auction house last year. It was a gilded menu with the name of the White Octopus Hotel printed at the bottom of the page. Eve recognised the distinctive lavender-grey hue of the paper. Not only that, but there was a stamped emblem of a white octopus at the top—and it was in every way identical to the china ornament she’d received from Max Everly and the tea set she’d found in France.

She began asking around the other staff members at the auction house. Most of them had never heard of the White Octopus Hotel. A few, like Kate, were aware of the story but clearly viewed it as nothing more than a myth. It seemed there was no further information to be found at work, but Eve’s interest in the White Octopus Hotel was a thirst that couldn’t be quenched. Finally, she thought of Victor, the valuer Kate had told her about. Eve had met him a few times before he retired, and he’d always been pleasant and friendly. It wasn’t too difficult to get his contact details from HR by pretending she’d found some old paperwork of his that needed to be returned. She considered phoning first but then decided to visit instead. She doubted he’d remember her, and it would be easier to talk to him in person.

She arrived at his home on a bright Saturday morning, with the white octopus Max Everly had given her wrapped up in her bag. A visitor turning up unannounced and uninvited was Eve’s idea of hell and as she knocked on his door, she suddenly wondered whether she ought to have brought something. Cakes, perhaps? Pastries? It was too late now, though, and Eve gritted her teeth at the knowledge that Bella would certainly have brought cakes. Then the door opened, and a middle-aged woman in scrubs greeted her cheerfully.

“Hi,” Eve replied. “Is Victor in?”

She nodded. “I’m Molly, his carer. Is he expecting you? He didn’t mention a visitor today, but he forgets things sometimes.”

“No, he’s not expecting me,” Eve admitted. “I’m an old colleague.”

“From the auction house?”

“Yes. Eve Shaw. I was hoping to speak with him about…about a work thing.”

Molly looked dubious. “He hasn’t worked there in years, so—”

“I know, but it’s important.”

Molly shrugged. “I’ll ask. He’ll probably enjoy a natter anyway.”

She flashed Eve a grin and disappeared into the house, returning a few moments later to usher her inside.

“Go on through. He’s in the living room.”

“Thanks.”

Eve went in the direction indicated and found a room filled with books. Victor was sat in an armchair with a blanket over his knees and a paperback novel in his hands. He put this down when she walked in and removed his reading glasses to peer at her. He was thinner and frailer than Eve remembered but had the same untidy white hair and kindly brown eyes.

“I’m sorry to turn up like this,” she began in a rush. “You probably don’t remember me, but I work at Stanley’s and—”

“Molly said,” Victor replied. “Forgive me for not standing, but my knees are playing up today. Make yourself comfortable.” He waved towards the sofa opposite him. “I do remember you, as it happens. You’re the one they call the Black Widow. You know, they probably wouldn’t do that if you smiled once in a while….”

Eve decided right then that she wouldn’t smile for the entire visit. “I don’t care what people call me.”

He shrugged. “You’re here to discuss the White Octopus Hotel, I imagine?”

“Did Kate phone you?” she asked, startled.

“No.”

“Then how did you know?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why else would someone from the auction house turn up here out of the blue?”

Eve sat down just as Molly came in with a tray of tea and biscuits. “That’s me done,” she announced cheerfully. “I’ll be back this evening. Don’t forget your tablets at lunchtime.”

The front door closed and then it was just the two of them.

“So which object did you find?” Victor asked.

“Pardon?”

“From the hotel.” He looked eager, almost greedy. “I’m guessing you found one of the objects. Is it too much to hope that you brought it with you?”

Eve reached into her bag and unwrapped the octopus.

“May I?” Victor asked, already reaching out his hand.

She passed it over. He put his glasses back on and carefully inspected it from every angle. There was something almost reverential about the way he held it.

“What does it do?” he murmured.

“I’m sorry?”

He looked up at her. “What kind of magic does it have?”

Eve watched him carefully. “Do you really think that objects from the hotel have magic?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think it, I know it. I’ve experienced it. I assumed you had too. Why else would you be interested in the place?”

Eve took the octopus from him, knowing she could only give half of the true explanation. She didn’t want to mention the tattoo that was currently climbing the small of her back, her sketchbooks at home, or her own octopuses with their single black tentacle tip, because then he might want to know when and why she’d started drawing them and she didn’t want to get into that with anyone, much less a stranger.

“Kate told me the story about the hotel,” she said. “I wanted to find out more about it because the ornament came to me via…unusual circumstances.”

She saw Max Everly placing the item on her desk once again, heard the warmth in his voice as he spoke to her.

Everyone should have something on their birthday….

She recalled the feel of his hand in hers and experienced the strangest pang of loss.

“The White Octopus Hotel has been a fascination of mine for decades,” Victor said. “I worked in auction houses for fifty years, and every now and then, if you’re lucky, you discover an object that is truly remarkable in some way. I have a few stories, but nothing that compares to the music box.

“It came across my path while I was working in France in my twenties. I’d heard of the White Octopus, but obviously I thought it was a myth—like everyone does to begin with. Some of its objects are better known amongst auctioneers than others. For example, most people with a passing interest in the hotel know that the telephone from the Smoking Room will allow you to make a single phone call to someone who’s died. Other objects, such as the guest book—and your own octopus—are a bit more mysterious. But the music box is famous in White Octopus circles.”

“For doing what?”

He smiled. “The music box,” he said softly, “isn’t what you might expect it to be. It looks more like a child’s plaything, really, with its little mouse musicians. But it can play the most beautiful music ever composed in the world.”

Eve sighed, feeling her interest drain away. “Music is subjective, Mr. Harris,” she said. “How can anyone possibly know what the most beautiful music in the world is? There’s no such thing.”

Victor shook his head. “You would need to hear it to understand. It’s like that with some of the objects.”

“So what happened to the music box?”

“It was sold, of course. To a private collector.”

“Did you ever come across anything else from the hotel?” Eve asked.

He nodded. “I have a key to one of their rooms—Room Twenty-seven. It was once rumoured to be able to take a person back in time, to visit the hotel as it was in its heyday. That theory was debunked long ago, though, since apparently there isn’t any such room at the hotel. The man I bought the key from told me that he’d travelled to the hotel—which is quite difficult to get to, from what I understand—but had been unable to locate this particular room. These duds and red herrings do appear from time to time, unfortunately. It’s difficult to track down White Octopus items in the first place because many of the sales are held privately. It’s an auction house secret. Those of us who knew about them used to wear an octopus badge. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but to those in the club it was a signal, a way for us to identify one another. By the time I retired I hadn’t seen anyone else wearing a badge in years, though, so perhaps it’s died out. My colleague George was a keen enthusiast and was lucky enough to track down the reading glasses. Are you familiar with them?”

Eve shook her head.

“They allow you to see what you need to see in that moment. As soon as George put them on, he saw a woman walk through the door. She turned out to be his future wife.”

“But she would have walked through the door whether he’d put the glasses on or not,” Eve pointed out. “That’s not magic. That’s just coincidence and suggestion.”

Victor gave a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not. There are only two groups of people when it comes to the White Octopus Hotel—those of us who believe in its magic and those who don’t. One thing I know, though, is that you’re holding a piece of the hotel right there in your lap, and if it found its way to you, then it did so for a reason. There will be something magical and remarkable about that octopus, even if you don’t yet know what it is. That’s how it works.”

Eve folded the octopus up in its tissue paper and replaced it in her bag. The visit had turned out to be deeply unsatisfactory, but then so was everything else—this world, this life, this business of waiting for it all to finally be over. She was annoyed with herself for expecting more from this old man, and she was suddenly desperate for a cigarette.

“I don’t know if they still make them, but there used to be buyers’ catalogues,” Victor went on. “For the various items. Where they had last appeared, how much they’d sold for, and their magic, if known. There was one item I especially wanted.” He paused. “I spent nearly forty years looking for it, in fact. A sheet of writing paper from the hotel.”

“Let me guess,” Eve said. “It lets you pen the most gushing love letter ever written?”

Victor shook his head. He wasn’t smiling this time as he leaned towards her slightly. “No. The writing paper lets you write a letter to a younger version of yourself.”

Eve felt her breath catch as a tiny, treacherous flame of hope sparked into life inside her, furious and fierce and frightening. Could such a thing be possible? Could there really be such powerful magic in the world? Eve knew she shouldn’t do the what-ifs. The therapists she’d had over the years had said it was unhelpful, and yet it was impossible not to because there were so many of them.

What if Bella had never died?

What if her mum and dad were still married?

What if Eve had a normal life and wasn’t haunted by rabbits?

There was one hopping around on the floor right now, white with a black splodge over its eye, snuffling around Victor’s slippers. Eve tried to pretend she hadn’t seen it, tried to control the cold prickle of dread that crept over her skin at the sight of it.

“You mentioned an octopus badge,” she managed. “Does it have to be a particular design?”

“No, any octopus would do,” Victor replied. “I once saw an auctioneer in Berlin who just wore a tentacle. You can take my old badge, if you like. It’s not as if I have need of it anymore. I rather like the idea of it being out on a quest again.”

“If you’re sure,” Eve said. “Thanks.”

He heaved himself out of his chair and shuffled into the next room, leaving her alone. As she glanced around, waiting for him to come back, her eye fell on a framed collection of cigarette cards on the wall. She came across cigarette cards at work sometimes and had always been interested in these tiny, often very beautiful cards by anonymous artists that had once appeared inside boxes of cigarettes. She’d seen the vast Edward Wharton-Tigar collection at the British Museum and had admired the cigarette-card portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. They were an insight into the interests and concerns of people of their time and were sometimes referred to as the poor man’s encyclopaedia. Eve had her own small collection at home—all fifty of the Art Treasures cards issued by J. Millhoff & Co. Ltd. in 1926.

But this series of Victor’s was a collection she hadn’t seen before—the Measurement of Time collection by B. Morris & Sons Ltd., dated 1924. The cards seemed to depict various methods of measuring time. She saw water clocks, hourglasses, and sundials, along with less familiar methods such as an Egyptian clepsydra and a Chinese knotted-wick timekeeper. Another card featured a lamp timekeeper from the sixteenth century and beside that was a falling-ball timekeeper from the seventeenth century.

“I didn’t know there were so many methods for measuring time,” Eve said when Victor returned.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he replied. “We’re the only species that feels obliged to try to measure it at all. Here.” He held out a tiny enamel octopus pin. “Might I ask a favour? If you ever come across a sheet of the writing paper, would you let me know? I would like very much to put in a bid for such an item.”

“Of course,” Eve replied. “If you’ll do something else for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you still have the key to Room Twenty-seven?”

Victor paused. “Yes.”

“Might I borrow it?”

“I can’t see that it will help,” Victor replied. “Like I told you, there is no such room at the hotel. But…well, it’s not much use to me either. You can have it.”

A moment later, Eve left the house with a small brass key, perfectly ordinary looking except for the octopus motif at the top, its brass tentacles wrapped around the number 27. She lit a cigarette as soon as she was out the door. As always, Eve found it impossible to suppress a shudder at the sight of that number. The twenty-seventh—her birthday, the day that everything changed. A twinge of guilt crept over her at the lie she’d spoken to Victor. Of course she would not tell him if she found the writing paper. Of course she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell anyone. If such a thing existed, and if she ever found it, then she would keep it for herself. Because if the writing paper was real, if it did exist, then there was a chance, however slim, that the great sin of Eve’s life could be undone.

Chapter 5

The next day, Eve set the tea service out on the small table in her kitchen. She filled the sugar bowl and the milk jug and poured tea into one of the teacups. And all the while, she kept wondering whether something would happen, whether some magic would reveal itself. She added sugar and milk, although she didn’t normally take sugar, but it seemed important to use as much of the set as possible. She raised the teacup in her hands. It was so timelessly elegant, so different from the old mug she normally used. Steam twisted up from the surface and Eve scalded her lips slightly as she took her first sip.

Nothing happened. It was simply overly sweet tea in a pretty teacup. She set it back down on the saucer, shaking her head. This was foolish. She was a fool for believing in magic like this—the type that could lead to redemption. There was no forgiveness—not for someone like Eve. She gulped down the tea, almost relishing the burn, then set the empty cup back on its saucer. And then there was a flash—a dazzlingly bright flash inside her head. She yelped and jumped up from the chair, but she was no longer in her kitchen, and she was no longer herself.

She was on some kind of hospital ward, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, helping to bathe the stump of a young man’s amputated leg. A ragtime record played on a gramophone nearby. She could smell antiseptic and cigarette smoke and freshly baked pretzels.

Are you coming to the farewell dinner tonight? the young man asked, looking right at her.

We’ll have to ask Matron, too, someone else said. Otherwise, there’ll be thirteen guests at the table.

And then it was all gone, and Eve was back in her own kitchen, wearing her own clothes. Her chair had fallen over, but everything else remained the same. She was breathing hard as she realised that Victor was right. The tea set did have a magical power. It allowed you to glimpse another person’s life from another time. She brewed more tea immediately, but there were no further visions that day, or the day after. Perhaps one was all you got.

But it made her more determined than ever to find the writing paper.

The next morning, Eve phoned her dad. She described the White Octopus Hotel, but he sounded baffled on the other end of the line.

“We did go to Switzerland once, when you were tiny,” he said. “But we stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast. It was all we could afford back then. There were never any grand hotels, I’m afraid.”

“Is that Eve?” Her stepmother Suzy’s voice floated through from the background. “Ask her when she’s coming for lunch.”

“Did you hear that?” her dad asked.

“Yes,” Eve replied. “I promise I’ll visit soon.”

Eve had known Suzy since she was eight years old and had been pleased to call her stepmum just two years after that. Suzy was easygoing, warm, and caring, and had always treated Eve like a daughter. Her love was big and certain and reliable. After finishing the call with her dad, Eve stared at the phone in her hand. There was nothing for it; she’d have to phone her mum. When had she last spoken to her? At Christmas, probably, when Eve had invited her over to her flat for mince pies. She’d made them herself from scratch. She’d hoped…what? Even now, she wasn’t sure exactly. For something normal. Something real.

Christmas was a difficult time because she didn’t have work to fill her days. There had never been many friends because Eve avoided people. They said you couldn’t miss what you’d never had, but Eve did wonder, sometimes, how she’d ended up quite so alone. She felt the emptiness of the years stretching out ahead of her, the pointlessness of continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

“You’d like a better relationship with your mum, wouldn’t you?” her therapist at the time had said. “Well, that has to start somewhere.”

So Eve issued the invitation and she made the mince pies, but as soon as her mum walked into the flat, it felt wrong. Like inviting a colleague whom you thought you might be able to form a friendship with and then realizing that your relationship was better off left in the workplace after all. Eve’s mum must have felt the same way because she had stayed for only half an hour before she’d made her excuses and left.

Now Eve took a breath and her heart started beating faster as her thumb hovered over her mum’s number. Chances were that she wasn’t even in the country. She rarely was these days. Her work as a photographer took her all over the world. One of the many reasons Eve hesitated to call was that she might wake her up if she was in a different time zone. Finally, she rang the number and her mum answered on the second ring.

“Eve? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. I, um, I’m sorry to call, but I wanted to ask you something.”

“What’s that?” her mum replied, sounding wary.

“When I was little, did we ever go to this place called the White Octopus Hotel?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “Why do you want to know about the White Octopus?” her mum finally asked.

“So we did go there then?” Eve replied.

“Well, in a manner of speaking.”

“What does that mean?”

Her mother paused, then said, “Come over, if you want.”

“You’re at home?” Eve asked.

“Briefly. I’m flying back to Marrakech this evening.”

Eve was startled by her mother’s invitation. It had been several years since she’d set foot in her old family home, despite the fact that it was only half an hour or so away.

“All right,” she said, trying to control her nerves. “I’ll see you soon.”

—

A short while later, Eve got off the bus and walked down the road to her childhood house. She hadn’t lived there since she was six. When her parents split up, it had been assumed by everyone involved that Eve would live with her dad. She’d seen her mum, of course, for weekends and special occasions. Sometimes they went out for burgers or to the cinema. But the problem was that they never seemed to quite know what to say to each other. It was almost like they weren’t really mother and daughter at all, only actors playing their parts.

As Eve approached the house now, she wondered how her mother could bear to remain living here. To walk past the spot where it had happened every day. She reached into her pocket for the fumsup, rubbing her thumb frantically over its smooth wooden head. Even the fucking gate was the same—the gate that had changed everything. Eve paused on the pavement, wishing she didn’t have to touch it. It was a perfectly ordinary gate, with a few flakes of blue paint still clinging to it, but if Eve had been her mother, she would have had it ripped out and sent for scrap. Even now, after twenty-four years, Eve hated that gate with a smouldering intensity that made it hard to breathe as she released the latch and swung it open….

Chapter 6

Eve—27th August 1992

“Make sure you close the gate!” her mum called from the kitchen window as Eve rushed down the garden path.

“Okay!” she shouted back.

She half skipped, half bounced along, relishing the feel of her petticoats swishing around her legs. It was too hot and sticky a day for such a dress, but Eve had picked it out herself the week before and she adored the purple polka dots and the way the skirts puffed out around her legs. Her shoes were new too, glittery with shiny buckles. Her black hair was tied up in two high pigtails and she’d never felt more like a princess.

She pulled open the gate to see the party banner her mum had attached to it. Large, looping letters spelled out:

Welcome to Eve’s 4th Birthday Party!

A single purple balloon was tied to the gatepost, bobbing in the breeze.

“This way people will know they’ve come to the right house,” Eve’s mum had told her. “We don’t want your friends accidentally going to someone else’s house, do we?”

Eve had never had a birthday party before, and as the week had gone on, her excitement had built so much that she’d started to think she might burst with it. Now, at last, the day was finally here and the only thing spoiling it was Bella. Eve hopped up and down on the spot a few times to make the lights in the soles of her shoes flash—staring at the gate, and the balloon, and the banner.

A few minutes later, she turned on her heel and ran back down the path to the house. In the living room, she found Bella toddling around. Her little sister had a new party dress too—blue gingham with a large appliquéd bunny rabbit on the skirt, delightfully fluffy and white, with a black splodge over its right eye. Bella’s black curls were held back with blue clip-on bows. She picked up a balloon with both arms, beaming in delight.

“No, Bella, put it back!” Eve said crossly. “Those are for my party!”

It was hard not to be annoyed with Bella sometimes. It seemed as if she was forever messing up Eve’s things, or breaking her toys, or getting in the way, or throwing food on the floor, or crying, or taking up all their mother’s attention. They couldn’t even go out for picnic lunches now, like they used to, because Bella needed to be back home for her midday nap. But today was Eve’s day, not Bella’s. Her sister ran off with the balloon, disappearing out the door with a giggle.

Eve wanted to go after Bella and get the balloon back, put it where it belonged with the others, but Bella screamed if you took things from her, and then their mum would come out and start telling Eve off. It always seemed to be Eve who got into trouble, never Bella.

“She’s just a baby,” her mum would say.

There was an endless list of instructions when it came to Bella.

You have to be patient.

You have to share.

You have to wait.

Be nice, be gentle, don’t fuss.

It would be easier to go and find the balloon once Bella had inevitably tired of it and bring it back then, so Eve skipped into the kitchen, which was a whirlwind of laughter and activity, with sandwiches being cut into triangles and biscuits piled on paper plates and lemonade poured into a big jug, fizzing and sparkling. Her mum had just picked up the birthday cake—a cat with Smarties for eyes and purple frosting for fur. And then there was the blaring of a car horn, and the squealing of tires, and the sound of people shouting and running about outside.

“Oh dear,” Auntie Pam said, glancing out the window. “I think there’s been an accident….”

Eve’s mum looked out the window and suddenly froze. Then a sound escaped her lips that was somewhere between a choke and a groan, so full of dread and despair that Eve went still too. Her mum dropped the cake. The plate broke in two on the floor and the cat’s head slid off to one side. Eve started to howl because how could there be a birthday party without a birthday cake? She fully expected her mum to swoop in and comfort her, but instead she ran right out of the room without a backwards glance. Perhaps she’d run to the shops to buy another cake? Eve took a step towards the door, still crying, but her auntie Pam scooped her up. She was barely paying any attention to her, though, but staring out the window instead.

“My cake!” Eve wailed, louder than ever.

She thought her auntie Pam would surely comfort her, since her mum wasn’t here. But instead, she said, “For God’s sake, Eve, hush!”

There was something harsh and horrible about her tone, so different from the way her aunt normally spoke to her. Eve went silent, and suddenly she was afraid rather than upset. Something was wrong—something that was even worse than the cake, though she couldn’t think what. Her aunt whisked Eve into the dining room at the back of the house. There were no windows facing the front, but Eve could still hear shouting and, soon after that, the sound of a siren. Then it all went very quiet.

Eve’s uncle Ben arrived at some point and Eve could hear him answering the door and speaking in a low voice to the people who rang the bell on the other side. She knew it was her friends because she caught snatches of their voices before the door was closed and the quiet swept through the house again.

“Auntie Pam,” she said, tugging at her aunt’s sleeve. “Where’s Mum? When’s my party?”

Her aunt crouched down by her side. “We can’t have a party today, Eve. There’s been an accident. Bella got hurt. Do you understand?”

Eve didn’t. Not really. Bella was always hurting herself because she was always falling into things, and bumping her head, and tripping over. Normally their mum just popped a rainbow plaster on the scrape, gave Bella a kiss and a cuddle, and then everything was fine. She felt a flash of anger. Her little sister was ruining things again. She was always ruining things.

“But where is Bella?” she asked.

Auntie Pam swallowed. There was something wrong with her voice because it came out all dry and husky. “She’s…they’ve taken her away in an ambulance.”

“But what about my party?” Eve’s voice rose to a wail again.

She could feel hot tears filling her eyes. It wasn’t fair. This was the one day that was about her, and Bella had spoiled it. In that moment, she didn’t merely dislike her little sister, she hated her.

“Eve, stop it! This is, listen, this is serious. Bella is…She got out into the road.”

Don’t forget to close the gate….

Eve saw the blue gate in her mind, with the purple banner and balloon. An icy, tingling feeling crept over her skin, despite the heat. Some of her anger and hurt ebbed away and she felt a flash of concern for Bella instead. Then an idea occurred to her, and she hopped down from the dining room chair.

“It’s okay, Auntie Pam,” she said. “I’ll get the plasters.”

Eve had tropical fish plasters, but Bella liked the rainbow ones best and Eve knew where they were kept in the bathroom cabinet. Auntie Pam put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s not that kind of…A plaster won’t help, dear. Anyway, Bella isn’t here. I told you, the ambulance took her away.”

Eve frowned, more confused than ever. “But when will she be back?”

Her aunt rubbed her temples. “That’s enough questions now, Eve. We just have to wait, okay?”

So they did. They waited for what seemed like hours. Eve was allowed back into the living room at some point, but her aunt had drawn the curtains so that she couldn’t see outside.

“To keep the sun out,” she said.

She put cartoons on the TV for Eve and then she and Uncle Ben were talking in the kitchen in hushed, urgent voices. Auntie Pam brought a plate of sandwiches out for her a short while later. Eve asked about her party a few more times, but Auntie Pam just shook her head and said there wasn’t going to be one.

Eve really didn’t know whether to feel angry and upset about the party or worried about Bella, so she ended up feeling a weird mixture of both. The afternoon dragged on and then Auntie Pam made her fish fingers and chips for tea. She’d just put the plate down in front of her when the telephone rang. Eve listened as her aunt had a brief conversation that ended in a strangled sob.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”

She hung up the phone and Eve carefully set down her knife and fork, even though she’d barely started her dinner. She knew, somehow, that she was about to be told something that she wouldn’t like. Something that would change things. Something that there would be no coming back from. The plate remained untouched on the table and she was relieved to hear the front door open a short while later as her mum and dad came in. They would explain things to Auntie Pam. They probably had Bella with them. Eve decided then that she’d let her sister keep the purple balloon she’d taken. In fact, she could have all the balloons.

She shook off her aunt’s hand and ran out into the hallway, eager to see her sister…but it was only her parents standing there. Eve flew to them. Her arms wrapped tight around her mum’s legs and she let out a whimper as all the fear and confusion and upset of the day bubbled to the surface. Finally, at last, she would get the thing she most wanted in that moment—to have her mum’s arms wrapped around her, keeping her safe and telling her not to worry and that everything would be okay.

But instead, her mum grabbed her upper arms and yanked her roughly off her legs. She crouched on the doormat and leaned close to her daughter. Eve shrank back because for a moment she truly thought this wasn’t her mum at all. She looked so different. There was something wrong with her face, something ghoulish and frightening.

“Did you close the gate?” her mum hissed.

Her voice was wrong too; she didn’t sound like herself at all. Eve stared at her, too afraid to answer. Her mother’s hands tightened hard enough to leave bruises and then she was shaking Eve.

“Did you?”

“Jane, don’t!” her dad exclaimed. “For Christ’s sake!”

Eve started to cry. She had no idea what was happening. The next moment, Auntie Pam was ushering her mum into the kitchen and her dad was picking Eve up and carrying her upstairs. He closed the door to Eve’s bedroom and she was relieved that it muffled the sound of her mother’s sobs.

“Daddy,” she whimpered.

He wrapped his arms around her, reassuringly warm and solid, yet she could feel that he was trembling, and when he spoke his voice was shaking too and each word made him gasp.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault, Eve, I want you to remember that. Nobody blames you. Nobody.”

Chapter 7

Eve—2016

The gate’s hinges squeaked as Eve swung it open, then she took a deep breath and stepped through, reaching around to close it carefully behind her. Twenty-four years too late. The front door opened before Eve had the chance to ring the bell. Her mum stood in the doorway, wearing a white shirt tucked into belted khaki trousers. Her dark hair was liberally streaked with grey and pulled up in a clip. Her green eyes swept over Eve, taking her in.

“You look tired,” she said bluntly. “Come in. The kettle’s on. I only have mint tea, I’m afraid.”

Eve knew her mum only drank mint tea, and that she liked it because it reminded her of her time in Morocco. Her mum had never told her this herself, but Eve had read it in an interview in a photography magazine a while ago. She subscribed to several of them, although she had no particular interest in photography herself. But from time to time, one of her mum’s photos would appear, or—even better—an interview. And through these Eve would glean little tidbits about what her mum was doing now, or what she liked, or what she thought about things. It was like discovering gold.

“That’s fine,” she said now.

They had to walk through the lounge to get to the kitchen and Eve couldn’t help glancing at the walls where the family photos used to hang. Her mother had taken them all down at some point and replaced them with her own photographs of far-off places—the pyramids in Egypt, sloths in Costa Rica, golden temples in Thailand. An entire wall was taken up with her favourite subject to photograph—abandoned buildings. They were both eerie and fascinating, and Eve would have liked to stop and look at them properly, but her mum was striding ahead too quickly. She glimpsed what looked like the deserted cooling tower of an old power station, a ghost town in America, and the inside of an abandoned shopping mall. Looking at her living room now, you’d think her mum didn’t have a family at all.

A few minutes later, Eve and her mum sat across the table from each other in the pristinely clean kitchen with cups of mint tea, steaming and fragrant. A clock on the wall ticked too loudly and Eve could already feel a headache starting behind her eyes. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

“Thanks for fitting me in,” Eve began, then winced.

She’d made it sound like they were having a business meeting. It was always so difficult to know what to say to her mum and often it felt as if every single word was somehow wrong.

“It’s nice to see you,” her mum said with a brisk nod. They both knew it was a lie. “So you wanted to know about the White Octopus Hotel?”

“Did we visit during the Switzerland trip?” Eve asked.

“I’m surprised you remember. You were only three.”

Eve’s breath caught in her throat. Her dad must have been mistaken after all. “How long did we stay there?”

Her mum raised an eyebrow. “Stay there? We didn’t. It had been closed for years.”

“But…” Eve frowned. “I can remember things about it. The afternoon tea. There were peppermint creams.”

White and sparkling and perfect on the silver plate, so cold and tingly as they crumbled on her tongue…

“You must be thinking of somewhere else,” her mum said. “A different hotel. Maybe somewhere you went on holiday with Glen and Suzy.”

It was hard to know what her mum thought about her dad’s new marriage, but then it was hard to know what her mum thought about anything. There had been long periods after Bella’s death when Eve hardly saw her at all. She was just…absent. Shut up in her bedroom upstairs, or else she would go out and not return for hours—sometimes days. Eve had been looked after by her dad and her auntie Pam more than her mum back then. About a year after Bella’s death, her mum had started spending a bit of time with her again. It usually began well enough, with a book, or a game, or an outing, but always seemed to end in tears and shouting, and afterwards Eve would never be entirely sure what she had done wrong. She would be put in front of the TV or distracted with a snack, and then she’d hear her dad in the kitchen, speaking in a low, even tone, and then her mum’s replies, her voice raw and breaking. She came to dread her mother walking into a room. It was a relief when her parents’ marriage finally broke up and Eve left for good with her dad.

“You can see the photo,” her mum offered now. “It was my first one.”

“First what?” Eve asked, confused. Her mum couldn’t mean the first professional photo. She’d worked as a wedding photographer for a few years before she met Eve’s dad.

“The first photo I took of an abandoned place.”

She got up and fetched a leatherbound album, which she set in front of Eve. When she flipped open the cover, the photo on the first page showed a hotel’s abandoned lobby. There were tall white pillars and a sweeping double staircase with intricate iron grillwork leading up to the floor above. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, cobwebbed and cocooned. The tiled floor was scattered with leaves, lumps of plaster, and bits of rubbish.

Eve’s eye was immediately drawn to the three-tiered marble fountain in the middle of the room. It was long dry, covered in algae and watermarks, but still a striking structure. A white marble octopus sprawled in the largest basin at the bottom, its tentacles twisting upwards to wrap around the fountain all the way to the top. Eve felt the same electric flash of pleasure she always experienced upon seeing an octopus. They were so endlessly fascinating and strange. Beneath her jumper, she could feel her tattoo drifting slowly over her stomach.

And right there, just visible in the corner of the photo, was three-year-old Eve herself. Her image was blurred, as if she’d suddenly stepped into the shot.

“I told you to stay behind me,” her mum said, “but you didn’t listen.”

Did you close the gate?

Eve looked up at her mum. Were they to be forever haunted by the unspoken words between them? After that first time, her mum had never mentioned the gate to her again. But the question seemed to hang over them always, and it was one they both knew the answer to. Eve had thought of finishing their conversation many times.

I’m sorry, she would say. I didn’t close the gate. It was my fault. If I could go back in time and switch places with Bella, I would.

But she’d never quite been able to summon the courage—perhaps because she already knew what her mum’s response would be.

It wasn’t your fault.

But.

But.

But.

I wish you had listened.

Just that once.

“Is this the only photo you took of the hotel?” Eve asked. The photos on the opposite page were of somewhere else—an abandoned amusement arcade, from the looks of it.

“Yes.”

“Why were we even there? Dad said we stayed in a B&B.”

“We did. The White Octopus was on the other side of the lake. I thought it would be interesting to see, so I took a boat across to explore. I thought you might like it too, so I took you with me the next day.”

Eve’s fingers itched for a cigarette, but she knew her mum wouldn’t like it if she smoked in the house. “Did Dad come?”

“No, it was just you and me. We didn’t stay long. Just explored the lobby.”

“Did you explore further on your own the day before?”

“I did. There was a key….”

She trailed off, frowning slightly, as if she’d forgotten what she was going to say halfway through.

“A key?” Eve prompted. “You mean a room key?”

Her mother nodded. “It was just lying there on the reception desk. Like it was waiting for me. The key to Room Seventeen. I went through all the floors, but no such room existed.”

Just like the key to Room 27.

“What happened to the key?” Eve asked. “Do you still have it?”

To her disappointment, her mum shook her head. “I lost it somehow. I didn’t notice at the time. Too busy taking photos. The hotel was…” She trailed off. “I’m not sure how to describe it. There was this atmosphere there. Echoes of the past. A lot of the original fittings and some of the furniture was still in place. There’s something melancholy and fascinating about an abandoned hotel.” She gazed out the window, towards the road that Eve wished she never had to see again. “They remind me of sunken ships.”

She wanted to ask more questions about the hotel, but then her mum spoke abruptly. “Listen, I don’t want to hurry you, but I have a flight to get ready for.”

Eve stood up, the chair legs scraping harshly across the floor. “Of course.”

“Why did you want to know about the White Octopus anyway?” her mum asked.

“It doesn’t matter. I just suddenly remembered it.”

Her mum paused, then said, “Is everything all right?”

Eve knew she’d never quite be free of this question. Not after what had happened at university.

“Everything’s fine.”

It wasn’t true, of course. Not anymore. As Eve let herself out of the house and fished a cigarette from her pocket, she supposed that most people had some kind of “before” and “after” in their lives. A defining moment, a point at which everything changed. There had been periods, here and there, where Eve had felt a muted sort of contentment in the years after her fourth birthday. But happiness—the real, bright, shining kind—was something she’d only ever known in that brief “before.”

Chapter 8

As soon as she was back at work, Eve set up electronic searches on auction sale finders for all the key words she could think of. White Octopus, writing paper, hotel, hotel writing paper, magical object…The list went on and on. If anything from the White Octopus Hotel turned up in any auction house in the UK, she would receive an email alert about it. She set up searches for eBay too. She even pinned the octopus badge Victor had given her onto her jacket, just in case she came across someone else who knew what it meant.

But the days and weeks passed by with no result and Eve could feel the frustration building inside her. She could keep tabs on the auction houses easily enough, but only for items listed for sale. What if they received objects from the hotel and thought they had no value? Or what if their owner took them to a flea market instead, as with the tea set? She couldn’t physically search every bric-a-brac stand in the world….

The more she thought about it, the more she came to accept that a sheet of writing paper wasn’t going to turn up in a public listing for an auction house because, as far as most of the world was aware, such a thing was worthless. She wasn’t going to find it that way. She would have to take a more proactive approach. So she opened up her emails and sent a message to her manager, saying that she was going to need to take some time off. There was, after all, nothing keeping her here and no one to miss her if she went away.

—

The next day, Eve was on a plane to Zurich. She’d informed her parents and Suzy that she was taking a break from work and going travelling for a while. Suzy was delighted.

“It’s about time you did something nice for yourself.”

Eve didn’t correct the impression that this was an ordinary holiday. It was a much simpler explanation than the truth. And she felt a guilty stir of unease about her stepmother. If Bella had never died and her parents had stayed together, then Suzy wouldn’t be in their lives at all. Eve loved Suzy and couldn’t say that she had loved Bella. Not really. After all, she hadn’t really known her and the bits she did remember were vague and fuzzy around the edges—an argument over a cherished toy, a forest picnic sticky with jam, a sunny afternoon in the garden at home, where Bella kept bringing her the apples and leaves that she found on the lawn.

Eve didn’t know how to reconcile what she wished to achieve with the writing paper with the reality of unravelling Suzy’s life. But surely Suzy would marry someone else and be happy in a different way. Some people would always find happiness. And Eve would give anything to undo the mistake she’d made. She’d always tried not to think about whether Bella had been scared in those final moments, whether she’d suffered, but even if it had been over quickly for her sister, her mum and dad’s suffering was a different story—an agony that had already lasted for years and would continue for decades to come. If Eve had the chance to undo all that, then she had to take it.

She arrived in the city on a sunny morning in November. She could practically feel the hotel up there in the mountains, calling to her, drawing her in like a magnet. A short while later, she was in a rented car, driving along unfamiliar roads as she left the city behind. It was past lunchtime when she finally pulled into the valley car park nestled at the base of the narrow-gauge train station.

When she got out of the car she was immediately struck by the peaceful quiet and the perfect purity of the air. It made her lungs feel clean. The mountains rose up around her, majestic, serene, silent. Eve thought it was no wonder that they used to build sanitoriums here for the ill to recuperate in. There was something cleansing about the landscape, but something lonely and ancient too. Lugging her suitcase after her, she purchased a ticket to the highest village, right at the end of the line.

The journey that followed was unlike anything Eve had experienced before. She’d never been on a narrow-gauge track, and it felt odd for the train to ascend so steeply, and it was hard not to wince at times when it passed perilously close to the edge of a sheer drop. Sometimes the window looked out on vast valleys, with villages nestled between the slopes, and at others there was nothing to see but rocks and pine trees and occasional traces of snow. And always, in the background was the extraordinary spectacle of the mountain peaks—like something from a painting or a dream, something beautiful but not quite real.

Finally, the train stopped climbing the mountain and levelled out onto a valley floor. But the journey wasn’t over yet. Eve emerged from the tiny train station and was relieved to see the cable car directly opposite. It was bitterly cold and the guidebooks had warned that it might be best to break the journey up if you weren’t used to the altitude, but Eve couldn’t bear to wait. She purchased a ticket and stepped onto the cable car. The windows inside were scratched from dozens of skis in winter.

The train had been bad enough, but it was an even more unnerving sensation to watch the ground rapidly fall away as the cable car followed the wire up into the sky, passing over forests of tall pines. It took about twenty minutes to reach the top and from there it was a short walk to the village itself, which was tiny and seemed to consist mostly of picturesque chalets. Eve had read that there were just over a hundred people living here and the village itself was very small. She made her way through the square, past a bakery, a cheese shop, and a newsagent. The ice cream place and the souvenir shop had both been boarded up for the winter. She noticed a small B&B that must have been the one she had stayed at with her parents, perched upon the edge of the lake.

The water sparkled and pine trees lined the shore, so thick and dense that they looked almost black, climbing up the steep sides of the mountains as far as they could before finally giving way to bare rock. The air was frozen crystal, and the closest peaks were a slatey grey, contrasting with the cool bluish tinge of the ranges in the distance. Some of the taller mountains went right up into the clouds. Even the sky seemed bigger here. The top of the world.

And there it was, straight ahead on the other side of the lake—the White Octopus Hotel. Eve would have recognised its distinctive spires and turrets anywhere. From this distance it looked just as it had a hundred years ago when it was a grande dame. You couldn’t tell that the windows were boarded up or that the grounds were unkempt or that the private pier was rotting. It looked as if it still stood ready to receive guests. And it really seemed to Eve that there were people inside the hotel at that very moment, perhaps enjoying an afternoon tea on the veranda. She could taste those peppermint creams once again—small discs of icy perfection laid out on shining silver plates. There was a pier on this side of the lake too, where a couple of small fishing boats were moored. Eve gazed around but couldn’t see any sign of the owners, so she turned back towards the bed-and-breakfast.

It was immaculate inside. There was no one behind the polished wooden reception desk, so she rang the bell. A man in his fifties appeared from the back a moment later and gave her an apologetic smile. “You’ve just missed our lunch service, I’m afraid, but there’s a coffee shop around the corner that does cakes and sandwiches.”

“I’m not here for lunch,” Eve said, although she realised that she was hungry, having not eaten anything since breakfast. “I was hoping to speak to someone who owns one of those boats. I want to go across the lake to the hotel on the other side. I’m happy to pay, obviously.”

“Ah.” The man gave her an appraising look. “Yes, people come to see the old place from time to time. Not as many visitors as she used to get, of course. Are you a ghost hunter?”

“No,” Eve replied. “Just curious. Is it haunted then?”

He shrugged. “It’s a strange place. Always has been. Nikolas Roth used to live there. They say the hotel came with the fog. It can cover the lake thick as cotton during the winter and sometimes you hardly see the water for weeks. One day, the hotel was there when the fog lifted. Perhaps it’ll disappear just as quickly—if it doesn’t fall down first.”

The thought of either possibility made Eve flinch, but before she could say anything, the man went on.

“I’m Aurel. I own this place, and the boats belong to us too. My wife could probably take you across, but not until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I was really hoping there might be time to get there today.”

Aurel shook his head. “Time works differently in the mountains; you’ll find out if you stay here long enough. We can’t fit it in today but will happily take you over in the morning.”

“All right,” Eve said. “Well, thank you. Do you have any rooms available?”

He nodded. “You can have your pick of the place.”

Eve asked for a room with a view of the lake so that she could see the White Octopus. The sunset, when it arrived, painted the lake gold, and the water glowed like a jewel before the sun vanished behind the mountains and the landscape was lost from view. Eve went downstairs for a quick dinner of Käseschnitte, the melted cheese and pickled gherkins helping to restore her energy from the long day travelling.

She spent the rest of the evening drawing in her room. Tentacles spilled out onto the page, curled tight around golden keys and painted music boxes, double clefs and musical notes. Eve found herself wondering what the most beautiful music in the world might possibly sound like.

The moonlight shone silver upon the calm surface of the lake and Eve looked up every now and then at the silhouette of the White Octopus, just visible on the opposite shore. Finally, she decided to turn in for the night. She glanced out the window one final time and for a moment could have sworn that there was a light on in one of the rooms of the hotel. A bright yellow glow shining from the window, that immediately faded into the innocent silver of the moon flashing upon frozen glass.

Chapter 9

The next morning, Eve was up early, impatient for the boat trip she’d been promised. She found Aurel’s wife, Friede, in the breakfast room and there was something about her warm friendliness that reminded her of Suzy and immediately helped take the edge off the strange feeling of nervousness that had been with her since she woke up. She couldn’t stop fiddling with the fumsup in her pocket.

“We’re not exactly swamped for the breakfast service, as you can see, so I’ll take you across the lake once you’ve eaten,” Friede told her.

“I’m not hungry,” Eve replied. “Could we go now?”

“I’m ready when you are,” Friede replied with an easygoing shrug. “Best wrap up warm.”

Eve piled on as many layers as she could before meeting Friede at the pier. She wobbled as she climbed into the boat, slipping on the frozen boards, and the fumsup fell from her pocket, landing in the water with a splash. She let out a cry of dismay and Friede shook her head.

“Water’s quite deep here, I’m afraid. I hope it wasn’t valuable, whatever fell in.”

It wasn’t the value that Eve minded, it was the fact that the fumsup had been her companion through a great many dark moments. She was already painfully aware of its absence in her pocket, but there was nothing that could be done now. She gritted her teeth as she sat down in the boat. The motor sputtered into life and there was the tang of petrol mixed with the crystal scents of cold water and frosted chains.

“Ghost hunter or photographer?” Friede asked conversationally as the boat pulled away.

“Neither,” Eve replied. “Just interested, that’s all. I came here on holiday as a kid.”

Friede nodded and Eve was glad when she didn’t ask any more questions but was content to let the boat trip pass quietly. As the hotel got closer, it was like seeing a photograph slowly developing—the details appearing, a spark of an idea made real. But more than that, it was like coming home. Eve felt a strange tingling sensation wash over her as she stared at the hotel. It knew she was here. She was suddenly certain of it. It had been waiting for her. It had been waiting for years.

Once again, she felt that stir of memory that must have come from the trip with her mother—except it wasn’t the abandoned building she remembered, but a living, breathing, bustling hotel. The details appeared one after another, as sudden and bright as the flash of a camera—piano music and lace gloves and the splash of a fountain. It was disorienting and Eve shook her head.

“Are you all right?” Friede asked.

“Fine,” she replied, a little tersely. She wished she’d kept a tighter hold of that fumsup.

The journey took about twenty minutes and then the boat glided past the pier, which was falling to pieces. Several boards had come away entirely and what was left was clearly unstable. There were signs around the pier and staked into the lawn, warning people in English, French, and German that the building was dangerous.

“Probably best to pull up on the beach,” Friede said, nodding at the small crescent of sand at the edge of the water.

When Eve scrambled out, she was annoyed to hear Friede say that she’d wait in the boat. She desperately wanted to be by herself here.

“I was thinking I’d spend the day,” she said. “Could you come back for me this afternoon? I’ll pay extra.”

Friede looked surprised. “There isn’t much here,” she said. “No buildings or villages for miles. And you won’t be able to access much of the hotel either. The place is falling down. I wouldn’t go any further than the lobby.”

“I’d planned to go for a hike afterwards. My guidebook says there are deer and ibex around.”

Friede eyed her dubiously. “That’s true enough, but you don’t seem as if you’ve brought much in the way of hiking supplies.”

Eve tried to quell her irritation. What did it matter to Friede anyway? “I wasn’t planning to go far. Really, I just want to soak up the hotel atmosphere. I’m an artist,” she added on a whim. It felt an odd thing to say. She wondered if she’d ever spoken those words before. “I have my sketchbook with me.”

This seemed to reassure Friede. “All right. I can come back around three p.m.?”

“Thank you.”

Friede nodded at the prow of the boat and said, “Would you give me a shove?”

Eve leaned forwards to push the boat as hard as she could back into the lake.

“See you later,” Friede called over her shoulder.

Eve raised her hand in a wave as the boat glided away, then turned back to look up at the hotel. There was still something achingly beautiful about it, despite the fact that the paint was peeling from its walls and most of the windows were boarded up or broken. The once-manicured front lawns were completely overgrown with weeds and nettles, as was the dilapidated garden terrace.

Eve clambered up the beach and picked her way across the lawn, past the frames of old loungers lying on their sides and broken umbrellas with their parasols long rotted away. To her right, the breeze from the lake whistled through an old pavilion, and to her left, pine cones and a random assortment of rubbish had collected at the bottom of a long-dry swimming pool.

The place was completely and utterly silent. It occurred to Eve that she had never experienced a silence quite like it. No traffic, no talking, no phones ringing and beeping. It was peaceful, yet at the same time it seemed a strange, sad thing for a hotel to be in such a condition. Eve could feel the ghosts of the bellhops who’d walked the halls in years gone by and see the doormen adjusting their cuffs as they hurried down to the pier to greet guests arriving by boat. There would have been the hum of conversation and the bright ring of laughter. The chink of teacups placed upon saucers over on the veranda where a few tables still stood.

Eve reached the staircase leading up to the front doors and placed her hand on the marble balustrade, which was icy cold to the touch. Her footsteps seemed too loud in this silent place, too intrusive, as she climbed to the front doors, which were hanging open. She cast one last glance back towards the sparkling glass surface of the lake, then turned and stepped over the threshold into the lobby.

At once, she recalled her mother’s comment about abandoned hotels being like sunken ships. The sudden darkness, the stillness, the smothering sense of the past pressing in from every corner. The place smelled of damp, and dust, and moss. All around there were details that she hadn’t been able to make out from her mum’s photograph, such as the wrought iron banisters of the sweeping staircase at the end of the room, or how the crystals of the chandelier resembled the beaded fringe of a flapper dress, or the golden service bell that still sat on the dusty reception desk to the left, waiting for someone to ring it. There was a fantastically ornate birdcage lift over in one corner, long out of service. The tiles beneath Eve’s feet had probably once been a pearly white to match the pillars but were now covered in a coating of grime and grit, fallen plaster, and collections of animal droppings.

She winced at the sight of the garish graffiti on the walls and pillars, as well as the Coke cans, chocolate wrappers, and cigarette butts scattered over the floor. It seemed such a sacrilege to leave rubbish in a place that had once been so grand and lovely. The sight of modern life jarred as well, and Eve felt the pointless urge to start tidying up.

She turned away from the graffiti to examine the baby grand piano to the right of the double staircase. It was entirely mirrored but so dirty and dusty that it didn’t reflect much of anything back. It sprawled at a painful angle on the ground, one of its legs snapped in two. The instrument’s keys were coated in dirt and many of them had sunk or snapped off altogether to lie in a sorry jumble on the floor. When Eve glanced back the way she’d come, she saw that a tall grandfather clock loomed beside the door, the time forever frozen. In the White Octopus Hotel, it had been a few minutes before twelve for decades.

The jewel of the lobby was the fountain. It drew the eye even now and Eve felt that same tug towards it that she’d felt all those years ago as a child. It was bigger than she’d realised from the photo, even taller than she was. The three basins were scalloped shells, now dirty and chipped, but there was something still striking and spectacular about the marble octopus sprawled in the largest one at the bottom, its tentacles coiling up and around the other shells.

It reminded Eve of those old-world paintings of a ship going down in a kraken attack—all gigantic eyes, icy sprays of salt, and flailing lethal limbs. When she peered into the basins, she saw they were littered with a few empty crisp packets, but also with coins—small change from dozens of different countries. Small wishes for something brighter and better. There were tiny musical notes painted on the inside of the basins too, as if the fountain had scooped up music as well as wishes.

Eve stepped back and glanced about the room again. She couldn’t escape the notion that there were eyes watching her. People in the corners, behind the pillars, manning the desk, waiting to take her luggage, confirm her dinner reservation, and show her to her room. Echoes of the lobby’s past were everywhere—in the wall of empty key cubbyholes, in the abandoned brass luggage trolley, in the golden bell gleaming on the concierge desk—so tantalising, so tempting.

Eve’s fingertips tingled as she crossed the floor, her shoes crunching over pine cones and plaster, and stopped beside the desk. Up close she saw that the bell had been nailed down, which explained why it was still there. It was an elaborate object, designed to resemble the navigational wheel of a ship. She raised her hand and tapped the button lightly with her palm. The peal of the bell rang out louder than she’d expected. A camera went off inside her head again with a bright flash and she gasped and stumbled back from the desk.

There was a magnetic magician’s smile.

The splash of a coin landing in the fountain.

The scent of peppermint.

Kind brown eyes…

Eve felt her breath catch and the sudden threat of those tears that come from someone being unexpectedly kind when you’re feeling unbearably sad. Which was odd, because Eve never cried….

Then the images faded away and she was staring into the mirror on the opposite wall. Its ornate golden frame was fashioned with seaweed and shells, and the glass was so tarnished that it was like looking at herself through fog. It was clearly extremely old, and the idea that guests and staff from the thirties—or perhaps even Nikolas Roth himself—had walked past it, their reflections appearing in the glass just as Eve’s was doing now, was enough to make her shiver. What had happened here? Why did the hotel close down so suddenly? Why did all of Nikolas Roth’s paintings vanish without a trace? And why did she feel so strongly that she’d been to the hotel once before, not as it was now, but as it was then?

The past pressed so close against her in this building, this moss palace for ghosts. The shadows shifted and flickered, and the barrier between past and present felt thin and fragile and almost not there at all. Still, Eve would far rather have had ghosts for company than rabbits. She glanced at the bell on the desk again. It wasn’t dusty or dirty like everything else. In fact, it gleamed a brilliant gold, as if it had been polished. Eve supposed one of the hotel’s recent visitors must have done it—perhaps a photographer hoping to capture a more striking image. It certainly was striking, and a little jarring, to see the bell shining so vibrant and bright, like a single pop of colour in an otherwise black-and-white photograph. Perhaps the key her mother had described finding here was placed on the desk for the same reason.

But there were no keys there today. The only other object was a large book, stamped with the crest of an octopus—a white one, with a single black tip on one tentacle. Eve stared down at it. It was her octopus. Her mind flew back to her flat and all the dozens and dozens of sketchbooks she owned that were full of tentacles. She put her hand on the cover, but before she could open it, a white tentacle burst out of the book and wrapped itself all the way up her arm. It was slightly sticky with ink and thick with muscle, squeezing just a little too hard.

But still, Eve smiled. “Hello, old friend.”

Chapter 10

Eve—2006

Eve had always enjoyed drawing, but she first realised her art wasn’t like other people’s when she started university. She desperately craved a fresh start where nobody would know her or her story. Throughout school and college, she had always felt like there was a spotlight shining over her wherever she went. She’d started primary school just two weeks after Bella died. Everything was so strange and frightening at home and then, suddenly, Eve was at school—this alien place where she didn’t know anyone, but everyone seemed to know her. She was famous. The girl who had killed her sister. The other kids whispered about her, and the teachers spoke to her in weird overly soft tones they didn’t use for anyone else. University was a chance to finally leave her past behind. Or so she hoped.

But when she got there, she found it a struggle to make friends. It didn’t help as much as she’d thought it would that no one else knew about her past. Eve still knew. She still knew everything—even the part that she’d never breathed aloud to another living soul. She enjoyed her art course, though, and was getting good grades. It was a relief to be away from the family home. She even started dating a nice boy called Daniel and this felt like something normal, like she was finally getting her life back on track to where it was supposed to be. Until one day they were in a café talking about Christmas and Daniel said, “My youngest sister is nuts about Christmas trees. I guess most four-year-olds are, right?”

Eve remained silent. The year she was four, they hadn’t had a Christmas tree. She still remembered how furious her mum had been when her dad suggested they try to celebrate Christmas for Eve’s sake.

I can’t! her mum’s cry of despair still echoed down the years inside her head. I can’t bear it, I can’t, I can’t! Oh, please, just leave me alone!

Eve hadn’t told Daniel about Bella. There had never been the right moment to reveal that she had killed her sister. She supposed he must have assumed she was an only child. And she wondered whether he would ever know her—the real her. After all, how could he when there was a wall between them? It was still there, it had never gone away—that wall that stood between her and the rest of the world. She broke up with Daniel before Christmas arrived. In the days and weeks that followed, she found herself thinking more and more about her sister. For years after the accident, Eve still hadn’t properly understood what had happened or her role in it. But now that she was so far away from home, it seemed that she could look back with more clarity. She saw with new eyes what she had done. And if life wasn’t easier here, then perhaps it never would be?

She couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard she tried. She started skipping lectures. She stopped going out and trying to make friends. The exhaustion and the guilt hollowed her out until it felt like she wasn’t actually a person at all. She was only a shell. Then one drizzly December afternoon she found herself standing on the edge of a motorway leading out of the city. There were massive lorries thundering past and she thought how easy it would be, to just step out in front of one. She was soaking wet from the spray and her face was streaked with grit and she trembled and trembled as she gripped the fumsup in her pocket and tried to remain rooted to a world that was spinning away from her.

Eventually, a police car pulled up and then she was being bundled into the back seat and a calm, gentle voice was speaking to her and asking if she was all right. It was a relief to have someone finally ask. To ask and actually listen to the answer.

“No,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I’m not.”

She wondered whether this would be an appropriate moment to cry—whether the act of doing so might bring some relief and make her feel better. She tried to summon tears, but there weren’t any. There never were. Her studies were put on hold, and she moved back home with her dad and Suzy. Yet another failure. There were doctors’ visits and therapy and antidepressants. Her stepmum took care of her every day, bringing soup and magazines and cheerful chatter. Her mum came just once. It was weird seeing Suzy usher her into Eve’s bedroom. Her mum was clutching a bag tight enough to make her knuckles turn white, so tense and uncertain.

“Would you like some tea or anything?” Suzy asked.

Eve shook her head and her mum declined, too.

“Right, I’ll leave you to it then.”

Suzy disappeared and Eve and her mum were left staring at each other across the silent room. Eve immediately wished that Suzy would come back. She was always good in social situations, always able to effortlessly fill those awkward silences.

“Do you want to sit down?” Eve asked her mum.

It was only after she’d said it that she realised there was nowhere to sit, meaning her mum had to perch awkwardly on the edge of the bed. She handed over the bag.

“Here. I got you a sketchbook.”

“Oh.” Eve was startled. She no longer had any interest in drawing and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to pick up a pencil again. “Thanks.”

“I got you some pencils too. It’s the charcoal ones you like, right?”

“Yeah.” Eve was surprised her mum knew this, but it was hard to care in that moment.

She wished her mum would leave. This was exhausting and making her feel worse. Her mum hardly ever touched her, so she was surprised when she reached out and very gently laid her fingers over Eve’s hand where it lay on the bed.

“Sometimes it can get very dark,” her mum said, gazing fixedly at a spot on the floor. “I know. Our minds set dreadful traps for us.”

At any other moment, Eve would have been both astounded and pleased to hear her mum speaking to her in such a way—opening up a little, letting her in. But now she couldn’t be bothered. With any of it. They might have been in the same room, but Eve was in one place and her mum was somewhere else and there was that wall again.

“I don’t think I will ever be happy,” she heard herself whispering.

In the seconds that followed, she wondered if she had actually spoken aloud. Eve and her mum didn’t have conversations like this. And it couldn’t be allowed, surely, to complain about the difficulties of being alive when Bella was very much dead? Eve knew if she’d said this to Suzy, her stepmum would immediately have insisted: Don’t be silly, of course you will be happy. Of course you will.

Eve’s mum withdrew her hand. “Maybe happiness is too much for some of us to hope for,” she said.

Eve flinched. She realised that, deep down, she’d been hoping her mum would say something different—that she could be happy, that she deserved to be, that she wanted her to be.

“I’m not trying to be cruel,” her mum said, noticing her expression. “It’s just that…aiming for happiness can be a heavy burden to put on yourself. Even if you do manage to reach it, happiness doesn’t last. You might find things a bit easier if you accept the possibility that there can be peaceful, contented moments in a life that’s quietly sad.”

Eve said nothing. Her mum’s words had a ring of truth, but she didn’t know if she could make the huge effort required to return to normal life if she could expect so little in return. What was the point?

“There are almost always some lifelines around us,” her mum went on. “You just have to grab on to the right one.”

Still, Eve remained silent. Eventually, her mum stood up. “I should go. Perhaps I’ll see you again soon?”

Eve shrugged. She didn’t especially want to see her mother again. She didn’t really want to see anyone.

“Mum?” Eve asked, just as her mum reached the door.

“Yes?”

“What was your lifeline?”

Her mother paused, with her hand on the doorknob, and Eve thought for a moment that she would evade the question, but instead she said simply, “It was my camera.”

Eve felt a dull, throbbing ache in the pit of her stomach. She would have so loved for the lifeline to have been her. Surely it should have been her? Bella may have been gone, but her mum still had one daughter who was there, and alive, and needing her. She supposed if it had been someone else’s fault, then perhaps it might have been that way. But Eve was the one who hadn’t closed the gate.

The drawing pad and pencils lay untouched for months. Until, finally, one April morning, the sun was shining and the fresh air coming in through the window smelled so inviting that she went out into the garden. She was sitting at the patio table, enjoying the feeling of the sun on her face, when Suzy came outside and silently set down an iced tea. And her sketchpad and pencils.

And Eve found herself picking up a pencil, testing the weight of it, and then opening the pad and gazing down at that blank, white page. The clean newness of it was calming somehow and then suddenly, she could see it. The octopus. Its essence was already there on the paper, begging her to bring it to life. So she did. The tentacles curled and sprawled across the page, and the pencil felt good and right in her hand, and the birds were singing, and things weren’t unbearable. They still weren’t good either, but they weren’t unbearable.

Eve looked down at her first octopus and smiled, pleased with how it had turned out. There was something still missing, though, some detail that wasn’t quite right…. She reached out and coloured in the tip of one of its tentacles.

“There,” she muttered. “There you are.”

And at that very moment, the octopus began to move—drifting up and down the page, exploring the blank corners with its curious tentacles. Eve stared at it, wondering whether she was supposed to scream or slam the sketchbook shut, but she did neither of those things. She didn’t feel scared, or horrified, or alarmed. She was even more pleased with her octopus than she had been before. She knew it was a possibility—in fact, a probability—that it wasn’t actually moving around the page at all. Perhaps she was imagining it. Perhaps it was a side effect of her medication.

But more octopuses followed—page after page of them. After a while, Eve started to take short trips out of the house to draw. She’d go to the park or a local café. And one day she was sat at a table by the window when a young man stopped beside her and said, “That’s cool. It looks like paper but it’s, what, some kind of tablet?”

Eve glanced up. “Excuse me?”

“The animation technology. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Eve looked back at her sketchpad and the octopus drifting around the paper, exploring the edges of the page with its tentacles.

“You can see it?” she whispered.

“Er…yeah? How is it moving around the—?”

“It’s a prototype,” Eve said, quickly closing the book. “Not available in the shops yet.”

She gathered up her things and left the boy frowning after her.

“How was it?” Suzy asked when she got home. Eve was a little out of breath and Suzy looked at her more closely. “Is everything okay?”

Eve nodded but couldn’t summon the words to say anything. Her mind was on fire with the knowledge that the octopus drawings really were moving, alive.

“I’d love to see your art one day,” Suzy said.

Eve tried to imagine Suzy’s reaction, but she couldn’t picture it at all. Suzy was so normal. So balanced. It didn’t seem like there would be space in her life for impossible tentacles and staring eyes that looked deep into your soul. For a moment, she was tempted to show her the sketchbook anyway, just to see what would happen and to share the extraordinary wonder of it. But this was a secret that couldn’t be unshared, and she was too afraid of what Suzy and her dad’s reactions might be. It wasn’t possible for a drawing to come to life, and an impossible thing was bound to make them nervous. What if they looked at her with unease and fear? What if they insisted she stop drawing and give up the octopuses? Eve already knew that she couldn’t.

“I’m…I’m not sure you’d like them very much,” Eve said. “They’re not really for show. They’re just, you know, for me.”

They’re my friends.

Eve didn’t know how or why her octopuses moved, but the mystery of them made them yet more precious to her. And with each one she drew, she felt them becoming more alive and felt herself getting a little better until, at last, she was well enough to come off her medication and go back to university. Still broken, still always broken and tainted, but stitched back together again for the time being. Her mum had been right about lifelines, after all. The octopuses had been Eve’s.

Chapter 11

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 2016

The tentacle gave her arm one final squeeze before disappearing back into the book, leaving an inky residue on her sleeve that Eve could feel but not really see. This was why she always wore black. It was a difficult thing trying to explain to someone why you were covered in octopus ink. Besides which, removing the stains was a nightmare. But this proved that it was Eve’s octopus—impossibly existing here in this hotel up in the mountains.

The book on the reception desk wasn’t a sketchbook. It was too big and heavy and looked more like a guest book. Perhaps it was an old one from the thirties, containing the names of the guests who had checked in for the final party. Eve liked the idea, this link with the last guests—but when she opened the cover, she found that the book only contained the names of the urban explorers and ghost hunters who’d come since the hotel closed. There were brief messages too, singing the praises of the abandoned building—how creepy it was, how eerie, how fascinating. Some contained cautions about unstable floors or empty lift shafts. Others offered warnings about hauntings and ghosts.

Eve looked up again at the deserted lobby. She wasn’t in the least afraid of the hotel. Whatever ghosts it might contain could not possibly compare with her own. In addition, she’d always been drawn to things that were dark and eerie. There was beauty in the shadows, if you knew where to look. The world could be an upside-down sort of place where rabbits were monsters and octopuses were dear friends. So Eve closed the book on the warnings and turned her attention to the reception desk. There was nothing much to find when she rummaged. The drawers and key holes were all empty, save for a few scurrying beetles and wood lice. She could feel the weight of the key to Room 27 in her pocket and decided it was time to move on. She retraced her steps and went through a doorway to the left of the main entrance.

The long room before her was lined with windows that would have looked out on spectacular lake views if they hadn’t all been boarded up. It was so cold that her breath smoked. It was dark, too—and as she strained her eyes through the gloom, Eve was startled to realize there were lumpy shapes upon the floor. Then her vision adjusted, and she saw that they were only piles of broken wood, perhaps from tables and chairs that had once filled the space. She could imagine this spot being the perfect place to enjoy coffee and tea while looking out at the lake.

She began to make her way to the end of the room, scrambling over piles of wood as she went, doing her best to avoid splinters and exposed nails, glad of her sturdy shoes. But the next door was locked. Either that or it had warped in the cold and damp and was jammed. Eve was unable to open it, even when she pushed with her shoulder.

She went back the way she’d come, hoping she wouldn’t encounter too many other dead ends. There was another door leading away from the lobby behind the piano. It opened onto a corridor that took her to various rooms, all in the same sorry state as the lobby. Some were so damaged and littered that it was impossible to discern their original function, although there were glimpses of the elegant salons they had once been.

The ceilings were cracked and water damaged and some were crumbling in an alarming way that made it clear the building really wasn’t at all safe. In places, however, Eve could see that the ceilings had once been painted. Ancient, tarnished mirrors still hung upon the walls, too heavy and awkward for scavengers to remove, and the same went for the chandeliers—although many of those had fallen down, broken shards of crystal and tangles of wire crunching underfoot.

There were long corridors, the wallpaper peeling away and the air filled with the scent of mould and damp. There was graffiti everywhere and Eve felt a creeping sense of disappointment. She’d hoped for more of a time warp, more of a sense of what these rooms had once been used for, perhaps even to stumble across a few interesting remnants of the past—such as a sheet of writing paper—or the abandoned possessions of previous guests. She’d hoped for ghostly fingers tracing down her back. But of course, all the belongings had long since gone.

When Eve found her way to an impressive pair of art deco doors, she stopped to admire them, pleased to discover a gem at last. Like everything else in the building, the stained-glass panels were dusty and dirty, but they were shining too, illuminated by a source of light on the other side. Eve saw scales and shells in shimmering greens and pearly pinks.

She reached for the handle, praying that the doors wouldn’t be locked or jammed, but they swung open easily at her touch and she blinked at the sudden flood of light washing in. The room before her was gigantic, with dozens and dozens of windows, many of which were broken, letting in the fresh mountain air outside—a welcome relief after the claustrophobia of the decaying corridors. The space was easily big enough to contain a couple of hundred people, but right now it was completely empty—except for the ibex.

The large mountain goat had a muscular body and an extraordinary pair of massive horns, ridged and curved backwards. It turned its head towards Eve and looked at her with calm amber eyes. For long moments, they just stared at each other. It was so unexpected coming across a wild animal inside a ballroom, yet the ibex looked far more like it belonged here than the Coke bottles and food wrappers. After a few beats, the ibex huffed out a breath that smoked in the frozen air and then turned to pick its way over the floor towards the open French doors. The next moment it had scampered out onto the veranda and was gone.

It was a relief to see it leave. The White Octopus Hotel was not a good place for wildlife. The floor was littered with pieces of wood and broken glass. Eve found herself wondering whether the glass could possibly be the remnants of the champagne coupes from that party, just before the hotel closed for good in 1935.

Graffiti marked the walls and mirrors as well as the stage set up at the end of the vast room. There was a grubby-looking sleeping bag rolled up in the corner that had clearly been there for years. Despite its condition, the room’s old elegance shone through in the painted ceiling and the glint of mirrors and the fantastic surviving chandelier.

Most of the light fixtures had tumbled down and broken over the decades, joining the detritus on the floor, but there was one that remained. It was tiered crystal, studded with paste jewels designed to resemble barnacles, with three tiny Murano glass octopuses clinging to the arms by looped tentacles. Above it, the ceiling was painted to resemble a dark night sky, inky blue and covered in thousands of silver stars. Eve stared up, feeling a new flash of recognition. Surely she had seen that chandelier somewhere before, somewhere fairly recently—just the other day, in fact.

Then all of a sudden she remembered. She’d seen this chandelier in a photo—the last known photo of Max Everly before his disappearance. It showed him in a ballroom at a party, full of champagne and women in silk dresses. Everly wore a black tuxedo and stood in the centre of the room, gazing at some unseen person beyond the photographer.

Eve had often wondered who that individual, just out of frame, might have been. A colleague, perhaps, a friend, maybe, but she’d always thought the expression on Everly’s face indicated a more intimate relationship. Surely, he was looking across the room at a lover. Eve had been so taken with the photo that she’d sketched it a few times, trying to get Max’s expression just right. And now she knew that the original had been taken in this very room, beneath this same chandelier.

That meant that Max Everly had been to the White Octopus Hotel. It seemed an incredible coincidence that a man bearing that same name had come to see Eve in London, yet it couldn’t be the same person. Not unless time travel really was possible…She reached into her pocket for the key to Room 27, letting it rest cool and heavy in her palm. It was time to find out whether she had just spent a lot of time and effort on a hoax. She knew from the guest book in reception that the lift was long since dead and she wouldn’t have dared risk such an ancient contraption anyway, so she’d have to locate the stairs to the upper floors.

She left the ballroom and went back into the damp shadows of the hotel to retrace her steps to the lobby. From there she climbed the staircase to the upper level. As she set off, she crossed her fingers that the floor wouldn’t suddenly collapse beneath her feet. It seemed solid enough, although the boards creaked, and the darkness was so complete that she had to use her torch to light her way. It seemed that most of the first floor had once been used as public spaces, but when she reached the second floor she found the first lot of guest rooms. They were all bare except for the bed frames and the rotting remnants of mattresses. Here, as elsewhere, graffiti covered the walls, and it was difficult to visualise the rooms as they once had been.

The brass numbers remained, screwed to the doors, and it didn’t take long to reach the room at the end of the corridor—Room 7. The lift shaft was here too. There were no doors to block it off and Eve couldn’t resist creeping to the edge to peer down into the depths, hoping to catch a glimpse of the golden birdcage structure she’d seen in the lobby. But, two floors up, it was too dark to see anything much, and being that close to the drop made her skin prickle. She stepped back and went to the stairs.

On the third floor the rooms were slightly smaller and so there were more of them. Eve frowned at the last one—Room 17. Hadn’t her mother told her that there was no such room? Perhaps she’d been lying about exploring the rest of the hotel. But why lie about such a thing?

Finally, she ascended the stairs to the fourth floor, which ended with Room 26. But when she reached the fifth floor, she saw that the first room in the corridor was Room 28. Just as Victor’s colleague had said, there was no Room 27; it seemed as if it had been lost between the floors.

Chapter 12

Eve took the key from her pocket, looking down at the 2 and the 7, tangled up in loops of tentacles. She had heard of hotels that didn’t have a thirteenth floor or a thirteenth room, but she’d never come across the number 27 being unlucky for anyone other than her or her family. Why would the hotel not have such a room? It didn’t make any sense.

Eve closed the door of Room 28 and then inserted the key into the lock to see if it worked. Perhaps the rooms had just been renumbered…. But the key didn’t fit the lock. When she went back down to Room 26 and tried the key there, it didn’t fit either. Over the next couple of hours, she systematically visited every guest room she could find. The key to Room 27 didn’t fit any of them, nor was there any sign of surviving writing paper.

Her clothes soon became grimy with the decades of dust and it was past one o’clock by the time she returned to the ground floor. Eve was hungry and tired and disheartened, but still she pressed on, focusing on the rooms she hadn’t yet seen. At one point she found herself in the wild, abandoned gardens at the back, which led to a grand building that had once been a suite of steam baths. There was nothing of any value out there, so Eve returned to the hotel. It was difficult to keep track of where she had and hadn’t been, but she got the sense that she had walked through most of the rooms by now.

The corridors stretched on endlessly and all looked alike. A short while later she found herself in a bar on the first floor, which had its original sign still fixed upon the door: The Palm Bar and Martini Room. She didn’t think there’d be any new rooms to explore after this one. As with the ballroom, there were lingering echoes of art deco in the bevelled mirrors, the glass too tarnished and dirty to make out a reflection—especially as the room was so dark. In fact, Eve realised it was one of the few rooms she’d come across that didn’t have any windows at all. It seemed an odd place to put a bar when it could have been looking out at the lake. The gloom meant she had to switch on her phone’s torch in order to see, and as she swept its beam into the corners, she felt like a diver exploring a shipwreck.

It had once been a very beautiful space. In places where the graffiti wasn’t too bad, you could still see the original silver-leaf-lacquered wall panels, and there was art on the ceiling too—elegant murals depicting various cocktails. It was possible to make out the names of some of them, spelled out in curling golden letters: the Sidecar, the Aviation, the Last Word.

There had once been velvet chairs and banquettes, but these had long since become homes for mice. Tables had collapsed and lay in broken pieces on the floor, along with shattered glass that Eve guessed must have come from bottles and crystal coupes. The shelves behind the bar were all empty, covered in a thick coating of dust. An antique smoker’s cabinet lay in sad broken bits on its side. Any humidors or cigars that had been stored inside were long since gone.

Eve wished she knew more about this type of piece, but it was impossible for her to date it with any accuracy. It might only have had the appearance of an antique or it could genuinely have been extremely old. She reached down to brush her fingers over the golden handles. Might Nikolas Roth’s own hands have touched them? Or Max Everly’s? The thought made goosebumps prickle over her skin once more and for a moment she could almost feel the ghosts of the two men right there in the room with her—the artist and the musician, lounging in the wingback chairs, smoking their cigars, listening to the crackle of jazz on a gramophone….

Her ears strained for the spectral echo of saxophones, the faintest trace of cigar smoke, mentally reaching for the past, but there was nothing here except dirt, decay…and the rabbit. There it was—white and fluffy, with a splodge of black over one eye, gazing up at her with such a sweet, harmless, innocent little face.

Why does BELLA get a new dress when it’s MY party?

Eve shuddered and then her resolve crumpled, and she did the thing she knew she must never, ever do. She spoke to the rabbit.

“How much longer?” she demanded.

How much longer am I to be punished? The rabbit wouldn’t answer; it never did. It couldn’t speak because it was, after all, only a rabbit. And what kind of answer was Eve expecting anyway? How long was a suitable punishment for killing your sister? The rabbit stared at Eve and Eve stared at the rabbit and they both knew the answer. Forever. She would be punished forever for what she had done.

There was a smothered giggle from out in the corridor, and a fragrant burst of crisp, fresh apples, and the thud-thud-thud of little steps disappearing in a rapid patter. Eve felt the knot of fury that was always there tighten a notch further as she darted out the door, the rabbit hopping along in her wake. It was hard to see much in the windowless space, but the scent of apples remained. She raised her phone’s torch and ran down the corridor. Bella was there, just out of sight, she knew it. Come to inflict more torment.

Without a second thought, Eve plunged into the twisting maze of corridors after the echo—or ghost, or whatever it was—of her sister. In no time, she’d reached the back of the hotel, and the sudden flood of sunlight made her wince. A row of gallery windows stretched the length of the room, offering views of the mountain vista beyond. A tiled checkerboard floor in black and white was visible beneath the dust, but the room itself was empty, its original purpose lost. Eve didn’t think she’d been here before, though, so clearly there was a part of the hotel she had missed.

She was out of breath, but the rabbit hopped rapidly ahead to the end of the room, where it stopped beside a doorway. An apple rolled through, mostly green with a faint blush of pink, a single leaf still attached to the stem.

Eve sucked in her breath. How annoying—no, infuriating—the apples and leaves had been that final summer. Eve would be in the garden, trying to play with her sandpit or run about with her ball—the pink glittery one she’d adored—and Bella would be forever walking up to her with a leaf or an apple that she’d found on the lawn, thrusting it out in a chubby hand.

I don’t want it, Bella. I’m playing with my sandpit, Eve would say.

But the apples and leaves kept coming and coming, until there was a giant pile of them next to Eve. And if she didn’t stop what she was doing and take the apple from Bella, then sometimes her sister would throw it at her instead and it would bounce off her head and it would hurt.

She doesn’t understand, their mum would say. She’s only trying to give you a present because you’re her big sister and she loves you.

Guilt and grief and rage were powerful feelings on their own, but mixed together they set one another off like warring siblings. Eve had grown better at controlling these three over the years, but you couldn’t be in control of all of them all of the time; you just couldn’t. Nobody could. She glared at the apple, and her whole body trembled, and her voice now came out as a roar. “I! DON’T! WANT! IT!”

Any other rabbit would have fled at the first sign of shouting, but this was no ordinary rabbit and it only gazed at her, unperturbed, as if it had seen far worse, thought far worse, lived far worse. Eve thought of the breathing exercises she had learned—tried to employ them now, to get the rage back under control. Of course, there was no controlling it—not really. The best you could hope for was to manage it, to trick it into going back to sleep, to try to pretend it wasn’t there.

Righteous anger would have been bad enough, but at least it would have been easier to live with. Unmerited anger, though, was the worst feeling of all. Eve knew she had no right to be angry—at herself, yes, obviously, but not at the rabbit, not at Bella, not at her mother, not at the gate, not at the world. Eve was to blame. Everyone involved knew this. She hadn’t meant for anything bad to happen to Bella. Most of the time she was almost completely certain of this crucial fact, that there had been no intent whatsoever—but even now, after all those years, there were days when she was so intensely and viciously angry with Bella that she could barely see or think or breathe. She was angry at her for going out through the gate, angry at her for dying, angry at her for the unfillable hole she’d left behind.

Even the window next to her seemed to be taunting her and she felt the fierce longing to put her fist through the glass, so she closed her eyes and concentrated on the box breathing. The breathing helped a bit sometimes, and so did the mindfulness—and practicing yoga and having a hot bath, or going for a walk outside and so on and so on. But those things only helped a bit, when the black feeling wasn’t too huge and powerful. When the darkness was sleeping. But if it was awake and hungry, then doing some yoga was about as much use as trying to close a gate on a tsunami.

Did you close the gate?

She reached for Max Everly’s music instead, switching on the record player inside her head, letting the familiar notes wash through her until she could breathe again. And breathe. And breathe.

Chapter 13

Eve—2007

The idea of group therapy sessions had been Suzy’s. Eve went along with it to keep her stepmother happy—and because she accepted that she herself might no longer be a very good judge of what was or was not good for her anymore. But most of all she went because Suzy and her dad had said it was a condition of her returning to university. Eve desperately didn’t want to give up her place, and the university ran a support/therapy group, so here she was, wasting another sunny afternoon in a depressing campus hall with uncomfortable chairs and dreadful coffee. As she took a seat in the circle it was hard not to think of all the other things she could have been doing.

And yet.

There was something a little comforting in realising that there were lots of other people out there who struggled beneath the weight of their burdens too. And they all seemed like nice, normal people—the type of people that Eve would never have guessed would come to a group like this. It made her feel like less of a freak. Less of a failure for unravelling the way she had. But she never felt much like saying anything herself. What would be the point? They could talk and talk and talk about Bella’s death and Eve’s role in it and how that made her feel, and how it made everyone else feel, but it wouldn’t change anything. And the emotions were a tangled knot that would have been impossible to put into coherent words anyway. Some things just couldn’t be spoken out loud.

“Right, everyone,” said Jill, the session leader. “Today we’re going to talk about coping strategies for when we’re finding things hard.”

Eve scowled. She was sick of coping strategies. They were for normal people with normal stress. They weren’t for people like Eve. They weren’t for people whose actions had caused something unspeakable to happen and who then had to live with the guilt. She listened as Jill went round the group, asking them what worked for them, what helped when they were feeling low.

“Going for a walk,” one girl with a sheet of long, dark hair said in a half-hearted sort of way. “Being outside helps a bit, I guess.”

Jill nodded. “Absolutely. Getting out in nature is always a good idea. Liam?”

The young man she’d indicated lifted his shoulder in a half shrug. “Deep breathing?”

Eve got the impression he was offering this up as an answer purely because he knew that Jill would nod and look pleased. She hoped there’d still be some obvious answers left by the time Jill got to her.

“Yes, and breathing is really a great one because we can do it anywhere, anytime, and no one even needs to know. Sarah? Have you found anything that’s helped you cope with stress?”

Eve glanced at the small, fragile-looking girl in the circle opposite her. She didn’t know what Sarah’s story was. Eve had never heard her speak in any of the sessions she’d been to. Her fingernails were usually bitten raw and she had a haunted look in her green eyes. Whenever Jill had asked her something directly before, Sarah had shrugged or shaken her head without saying a word. This time, though, she looked up and spoke for the first time.

“Music.” Her voice was soft but steady. “Music helps.”

At once, there were murmurs of agreement from others and Eve found herself nodding as well.

“Music helps me, too,” Liam said, looking much more enthusiastic about this than the breathing he’d suggested before. “I’ve got a couple of albums I always stick on when I’m feeling crap. As soon as that first song starts to play it cheers me up a bit.”

“I’ve got a list of songs,” a girl called Kelly volunteered. “They’re my happy songs. Pop stuff, mostly. Music for dancing.”

“And how about you, Sarah?” Jill asked. “What do you listen to?”

Sarah picked at one of her broken nails. “A composer called Max Everly. He wrote music in the thirties and it was…I dunno what you’d call it. Classical or jazz or something.” She gave another shrug.

“And his music cheers you up?” Jill asked, smiling.

Sarah shook her head. “No, but it makes me feel like it’s okay to be sad.”

Eve was intrigued. The very next day, she tracked down some of Everly’s music and realised at once that Sarah was right. It wasn’t cheerful music that tried to bounce you out of your low mood, nor was it sad music that made your suffering worse. It was a steady hand holding yours in the dark. Like a friend who didn’t want to talk you out of feeling bad, or offer solutions or advice or opinions or strategies. Instead, Max Everly’s music was a person who climbed right into the deep, dark hole with you, sat beside you and held your hand tight, and said, I am here and we’ll sit together for as long as you need and it’s okay. It’s okay to not be okay.

Eve always felt so grateful to Sarah for mentioning Max Everly that day, for setting her on the path to discovering his music too. Soon, she’d listened to everything he’d ever composed. Eve played her favourite songs over and over again until she even heard them in her dreams. And what Sarah had said was true. The music helped. Even on dark, dangerous days, like Eve’s birthday, the music helped.

Sometimes, it was hard not to believe that the compositions hadn’t been written specially for her. It felt as if Max Everly was reaching out to her, down through the years, offering solace. Eve knew this was merely the mark of great music. Sarah probably felt like it had been written specially for her too. And so, probably, did all those other people who had found comfort in the deftly woven musical notes over the decades.

Eve knew the music hadn’t actually been written for her…but it may as well have been.

Chapter 14

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 2016

When she opened her eyes, the rabbit and the apple had vanished. Eve unclenched her fists, straightened her shoulders, and set off towards the doorway the apple had rolled from, forcing herself to look inside. To her relief, there was no flash of black curls, no blue gingham, no bunny, and no apples. Instead, she saw the ruins of a library. The double-height room had an upper floor with its own balcony and bookshelves. Large windows were caked with dirt but faced a majestic view of the mountains beyond. A jumble of furniture lay in bits and pieces, and the broken windows had clearly admitted birds because there were piles of pigeon droppings everywhere, and even a couple of swan feathers.

The majority of the books had gone, but loose pages lay about the place like confetti, displaying random lines from long-lost volumes of poetry and prose. Here and there, a clump of pages had come out together and Eve flicked through a few of these, trying to identify the types of books they’d come from. It was encouraging to see paper of any kind that had survived for all this time. It surely meant that a sheet of writing paper might be around too.

Best of all, there were a couple of desks set beside one of the windows, so large and solid that they were all still in one piece. Eve hurried over, but the drawers were empty. Nothing remained of the papers that might once have been inside. There was nowhere left to search. When she glanced at her watch, she saw that it was a quarter to three. Friede would already be on her way, but Eve couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the hotel. Not yet.

She closed the last drawer and stepped back. Her heel landed on one of the sheaves of pages and she reached down to pick it up. She saw from the first lines that the pages had come from a book about art history. And as she flicked through it, something fell out—a black-and-white photograph. When she looked at it, the shock of adrenaline made her physically jump and let go of the photo. It fell facedown on the floor and she stared at it, her heart racing and her body tingling with the same raw energy that came from narrowly missing a collision with another driver.

Slowly, she shook her head. She was mistaken in what she thought she’d seen. She must be. She reached down to pick up the photo and turned it over. The image was faded and marked with brown spots but clearly showed the lobby of the White Octopus Hotel as it was before it closed. Water ran from the scalloped basins, a guest spoke to the receptionist behind the main desk in the background, and off to the right a uniformed bellhop wheeled a luggage trolley piled high with steamer trunks covered in travel stickers.

And the subject of the photo, a woman in her late twenties, stood beside the fountain, her chin-length black hair styled into elegant finger waves. She wore an extraordinary dark lace gown, silken and backless, that draped itself around her body and swept over the floor in a small train. The woman stood side-on to the fountain, her hands resting on the edge of the largest basin, looking into the water. There was nothing so very extraordinary about any of this, aside from the fact that it was an interesting glimpse into the hotel’s past.

The mind-bending part was that the woman beside the fountain was Eve.

When she peered closer, she could even make out the very tip of a dark tentacle on her exposed lower back. Her hair was styled differently, and her clothes were from a bygone era, but there could be no doubt that the woman in the photograph was her. Which left only two explanations. Either someone had photoshopped this picture and tucked it away in the library for some unknown purpose, or…Or Eve really had been here at the hotel in the thirties.

She slipped the photo into her pocket and brought out the key to Room 27 again. She had to be missing something. There must be such a room somewhere. She turned on her heel and went back through the maze of the hotel and up to the guest rooms. She walked down the fourth-floor corridor, counting them off—rooms eighteen to twenty-six, all present and accounted for. Then she went to the floor above and stood once again before the door to Room 28. This room was wrong; she was sure of it. This was the room that ought to be Room 27. She took her phone from her pocket and switched on the torch, shining it straight at the door, examining it up and down without any clear idea what she was looking for.

Even if the room had once had a different number, it didn’t change the fact that she’d already tried, and the key didn’t fit the lock. She pushed open the door and stepped into the room. Like all the others, it was a hollow graffitied shell, the only hint of its former glory lying in the magnificent lake and mountain view beyond the dirty windows. Otherwise, there was only a bare bed frame, a cold ash-filled fireplace, and a collection of wood lice that scuttled busily over the grimy floorboards. Eve could see Friede’s boat more than halfway across the lake. She guessed it would be at the hotel within five minutes.

But she made no move to leave and go downstairs. She couldn’t. She was rooted to the spot, breathing the room in. How strange to think that wealthy guests had stayed here from the turn of the century and beyond. For a moment, she could sense them beside her—the women rolling up their silk stockings, applying coats of scarlet lipstick, fastening diamond earrings in readiness for a glittering party downstairs….

Eve pushed the door closed, and that was when she saw that it had a brass plaque on the inside as well as the outside. And here, at last, was the number she had been searching for: 27. She stared at it—one door, two numbers. When she glanced back out the window, Friede’s boat was almost at the pier.

She looked back to the door and her hand shook slightly as she slid the key to Room 27 into the lock. And this time, the key went in smoothly. She turned it and heard the faintest click as the lock slid into place. And then there was that flash inside her head once more, but this time it wasn’t the pop of a camera flash but the blinding light of a shooting star. She cried out and stumbled back.

Her head felt as if it would break apart, and her skin prickled and fizzed. She thought she must be having some sort of fit. She wondered if she might be dying. Was this what having a brain aneurysm felt like? Nausea flooded her and her hands reached out for something, anything, to grab on to, but the world had disappeared and she was falling through the gap in the universe where it used to be. She fell and fell and fell until at last she landed. There was a thump, and a groan, and a loud, long silence. Eve tried to open her eyes, but she wasn’t sure that she even still had eyes. She couldn’t mentally locate them, couldn’t remember how to blink.

I’m dead, Eve thought. I died.

Time to face Bella, at last….

But then slowly, surely, the silence dissolved, bit by bit, until a baffling array of sounds filtered through, like music on a radio station that had been blasting out static but had finally been correctly tuned. There was the distant murmur of voices, the tread of footsteps, the opening and closing of doors, the crackle of flames, the tick of a clock. And muffled jazz music filtering through from outside. Eve remembered how to open her eyes, but it took a great effort and she had to peel them back as if they’d been glued shut. The blinding light had gone but had left behind intense aftershocks of brightness that came and went in her vision. She tried to lift her hand to rub away the gum and grit but once again felt that same disconcerting lack of coordination and only managed to scratch her face.

She dropped her hand and concentrated on what she could see instead, trying to focus through the flashes. Golden-brown wooden floorboards stretched ahead of her. There was a wardrobe opposite, standing against a wall covered in green-and-white striped wallpaper. It seemed like she stared at these for some time, trying to make sense of where she was and what had happened. Eventually, the flashing in her vision lessened until it faded away altogether, and she noticed the details she’d missed. The floorboards glowed in a single shaft of sunlight. The wardrobe had small brass octopuses for handles. The green stripe in the wallpaper contained a seaweed motif.

She struggled up into a sitting position, relieved to find she was more in control of her limbs. When she turned her head, she saw that there was a fire flickering and popping in the grate, giving off scents of wood smoke and pine. She had no idea how long she’d been lying there. She felt shaky and untethered somehow, as if she weren’t really here and might float away at any moment. If not death, then perhaps it was a dream? She reached into her pocket for her fumsup but of course it was gone, frozen at the bottom of the lake. There was a knocking sound that felt like it was coming from within her own head. She winced and rubbed her temples.

There was a bed right beside her with a white iron bedpost and she used this to drag herself up to sit on the bedspread. A monogrammed pair of pyjamas in ivory silk were neatly folded upon the pillow and a matching pair of slippers were placed on the floor. A small vanity table with an oval mirror took up most of the space on the other side of the room, and a painting of fish adorned the opposite wall. The space was small but attractive and comfortable, and the thought filtered into Eve’s brain that she was in a hotel room. For long moments she couldn’t think why she should be in a hotel rather than back home in her flat or at work in the auction house. The knocking inside her head made it hard to think, but then the memories bobbed to the surface, one by one. Switzerland. The lake. The White Octopus Hotel. Room 27.

Her breath shuddered in a gasp and then finally she realised that the knocking sound wasn’t coming from within her head, but from someone on the other side of the door. There was no brass number plate there anymore, and the room itself was unrecognisable. No graffiti, no dust, no broken glass. The smell of damp was gone, replaced with beeswax furniture polish and fresh pine. There was a green-and-white vase on the vanity table filled with cuttings of Nordmann fir and red chrysanthemums. The knock came again, a polite tap-tap-tap.

Eve wasn’t sure she could stand up, let alone walk to the door. “Hello?” she called. Her throat was dry, her voice a raspy croak.

“Room service!” a man’s voice replied, young and cheerful.

Chapter 15

“Come in,” Eve said.

There was the click of a key turning in the lock. The door swung open, and a young man stepped inside. He was dressed in a bellhop uniform—dark trousers and a pale green jacket with black braid. There was a small white octopus badge pinned to the lapel. A round, brimless cap sat on his head, black with a single green stripe. The bellhop was young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with pale blond hair, blue eyes, and an open, friendly face. A pristine pair of white gloves adorned his hands, and in them he carried a small silver tray set with a lace mat and what looked like a green cocktail in a tall, fluted glass.

“Good afternoon, madam,” he said, walking into the room and setting the tray down on the vanity table. Beside the cocktail was a silver saucer of sugar octopuses, their tentacles curled in elegant loops. “My name’s Alfie. I hope you had a pleasant journey.”

Eve looked up at him. “I’m Eve. Is this—” She broke off when a muffled giggle, quickly smothered, floated through the open door. She glanced that way sharply. “Who’s out there?”

Alfie’s smile stretched a little wider. “Why would there be anyone hiding out in the corridor? Please let me be the first to welcome you to the White Octopus Hotel. We are all so happy to have you. Ah, you dropped your key. Allow me.”

He bent and plucked a key from the floor. She saw that her bag lay by the side of the bed too. Alfie held out the key to Room 27 and Eve stared at it. Could it have actually worked? Was she gazing into the face of a boy who had lived and died many years ago? Her head spun with the complete impossibility of such a thing and yet—and yet, and yet, she knew that it was happening. She could feel it deep down in her bones. Her octopus tattoo drifted up her leg, making the skin there burn. Her fingers shook so badly that when she reached to take the key from the young man, she fumbled it and the key slipped through her fingers to the floor again.

“Sorry,” she said, breathless.

“Not at all.” The bellhop picked up the key for a second time and set it down upon the table. “You must be tired. You’ve come a long way, after all. Much further than most of our other guests.”

Eve looked at him quickly. She’d assumed that if she ever did manage the seemingly impossible feat of travelling back in time to a hotel, then the other guests and staff would have no idea about where she had come from. Yet, here she was, sitting on the bed in clothes that would have looked quite startling to anyone from the 1930s. Women had barely worn trousers back then, let alone black jeans. She was still covered in dust and dirt—and octopus ink, although luckily that didn’t show up on the dark fabric. Besides which, she hadn’t rung for room service.

“Do you…know where I’m from?” she asked carefully.

There was a scuffling sound from the corridor again, like someone shuffling their feet, followed by a cough and a shhh! Eve’s head whipped around to the open doorway. There were people out there; she could sense them the same way that you could tell when you were being watched—that prickle on the back of the neck. And not just one, but several. How many of them were there? And what were they doing out in the corridor?

She was about to risk standing up and walking across the room to see for herself when Alfie said smoothly, “Not the exact location.” He reached out to sweep an imaginary speck of dust from the table. “But if you’re a guest of Room 27, then I know you must have come from the future.”

She was astonished that he could speak of such a thing so casually. “And that doesn’t amaze you?”

He lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug. “It is amazing, of course, but live with the extraordinary for long enough and it becomes simply…ordinary. You’re not the first time-travelling guest we’ve had the pleasure of looking after.”

“What year is it?” Eve asked—a question she’d never thought to utter.

He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “It’s 1935. Twenty-fourth November.”

This time there was a flash of movement from the doorway and Eve caught a glimpse of auburn curls and a child’s grin before the face abruptly disappeared.

“Pesky kids.” Alfie walked over to the door and said loudly, “I do apologise, Miss Shaw. Some guests allow their children to run about the place completely uncontrolled. If you ask me, they could all do with a good spanking.”

He closed the door, and when he turned back Eve expected him to ask what year she had come from, but he said nothing further.

“Aren’t you curious?” she prompted. “About where I’m from?”

“It’s not the role of a good employee to be curious about the guests,” the bellhop replied, looking faintly scandalised. “I promise you can expect the highest discretion from every member of staff here at the White Octopus.”

Eve shook her head. “But this is just…It’s unbelievable. You mean that you all know I come from another time and you just accept it? I’m not going to be swamped with questions?”

“That might be the case in other establishments, Miss Shaw, but this is no ordinary hotel,” Alfie said with pride. “I can’t speak for the guests, though. I expect some of them might be a touch interested if you were to reveal that you’re from the future. If you’d like to, ah, blend in, then feel free to avail yourself of the clothes inside the wardrobe.” He nodded over to the one with the octopus handles that Eve had noticed earlier. “It has outfits for every occasion.”

“Were you expecting me then?” Eve asked, wondering how they could possibly have prepared for her visit so thoroughly.

Alfie shook his head. “Not us. The room. When the room knows a guest is coming it prepares itself. The wardrobe is an uncommon one too. It contains clothing to perfectly fit each guest. If you would like to explore the hotel and enjoy the facilities in your current…ensemble, then of course you are very welcome to do so. But should you wish to attract less attention, please do make use of the wardrobe. Your timing couldn’t have been better, by the way. You’ve arrived just in time for the party.”

“Party?”

“The celebrations for our fortieth birthday, which begin tonight and stretch over the next three days. Anna will assemble the guests at six o’clock in the Sunset Room to tell you all about it. It’s cold outside, so don’t forget your coat when you head out. We hope you will enjoy your stay with us, but when you wish to return to your own time you simply turn the key anticlockwise in the lock.” He nodded towards the door. “As soon as you cross the threshold, you will no longer be a guest. In addition—and this is something I must stress very carefully to you, Miss Shaw—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.”

“All right. How long can I stay?”

“As long as you like,” he replied. “You are welcome here for as long as the hotel opens its doors.”

That, Eve suddenly realised, wouldn’t be for too much longer if this was the twenty-fourth of November. She knew from what she’d read online that the last party occurred on November twenty-seventh.

“Are you…likely to close any time soon?” she asked carefully.

He gave a laugh. “I hope not! There’s an old story that the White Octopus won’t close until the day snow falls from the ceiling and other lives are glimpsed within the mirrors. Which I think is another way of saying the hotel will go on forever. It’s been here for forty years anyway, so I’m certain it’ll continue for forty more.”

Not true, Eve thought. You’ll close for good in just three days.

Eve wondered whether she should tell Alfie. Or perhaps she should ask to speak to the manager of the hotel and tell them? Would her intervention change anything? Or had it all happened already? Her head began to throb again.

“That’s why my grandfather wanted the party in the first place,” Alfie went on.

“Your grandfather?” Eve repeated, struggling to keep up.

Alfie’s eyes sparkled with a sudden hint of mischief. “You may not know this, Miss Shaw, but the White Octopus Hotel is a home as well as a hotel. It belonged to my grandfather. He was a painter.”

Eve looked at him with new interest. “Your grandfather was Nikolas Roth?”

Alfie’s smile widened. “So you have heard of him?”

“Of course. Is he still…?”

Alfie’s smile faded for the first time. “He died a few months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But I’ll see him again.”

“Did you grow up here?”

“My whole life.”

Eve longed to ask about his grandfather’s paintings and whether any of them were still around or had already vanished, but there were more pressing matters to address first.

“How much does the room cost?” she asked. Only now did it finally occur to her that she should have tried to procure some old currency before arriving here. “I don’t have any money.”

Alfie smiled again, just a small twist at the corner of his mouth. “Our rates don’t involve money. Instead, we deal in memories.”

“Memories?”

She felt a flare of alarm mixed with yearning. There were, she thought, some things that would be good to forget.

“You will have to give up all memories of the hotel when you leave,” Alfie told her. “Enjoy it all while you’re here, charge anything you like to the room, but be prepared to let it go at the end. Those are the terms for time-travelling guests.”

“I can’t pay with something else? A valuable item or—”

“I regret not,” Alfie said. “Memories of your stay here are the price. Always.”

“All right,” Eve replied, disappointed. “So be it. But why memories? What value have they got to anyone but the person they belong to?”

“My grandfather always used to say that there is a great deal of magic in memories,” Alfie said. “And the White Octopus Hotel can never have too much magic. Anna will be giving her speech soon, like I said, and you won’t want to miss it. In the meantime, perhaps you might like an opportunity to freshen up and enjoy a complimentary beverage.” He indicated the green drink. “This is a Nautilus—a cocktail that was invented right here in the Palm Bar by my father. He’s one of the hotel’s best mixologists. It was my grandfather’s favourite drink, and we’ve found that it helps our time-travelling guests to adjust a little when they first arrive. And a sugar octopus always goes down well too, of course.”

“It’s stunning,” Eve said, peering at the tiny octopus, delighting in the perfect curl of its looping tentacles.

Alfie grinned. “My mum made it. She’s the resident sugar artist here. Just wait until you sample her peppermint creams in the Sugar Room.”

Dozens of further questions fizzed on the end of her tongue, but Alfie was already making his exit. “Enjoy your stay at the White Octopus,” he said over his shoulder.

Then the door clicked shut and he was gone. Eve looked at the green drink. The tall glass bore the same octopus crest she had seen elsewhere. She was already feeling a bit better, more normal, but a drink couldn’t hurt, and she hoped it would be a strong one. She wasn’t disappointed. The first sip made her splutter, but she relished the cold, hard bite of the alcohol. It was the most delicious concoction she had ever tasted. The crunch of a sugar octopus was the perfect complement to the sharpness of the drink too.

With her head a little clearer, Eve went over to the door and peered through the eyehole that looked out to the other side, just to check whether anyone still lingered beyond her door. From the small amount she could see, it was deserted, and transformed from how it had appeared before. She turned away and walked through the balcony doors to the iron balustrade outside. The change was so dramatic that it was difficult to take in.

The weeds and ruin were all gone. A cart on the immaculate lawn dished out paper bags of roasted chestnuts to elegant women in fur coats. A trio of musicians in the pavilion were responsible for the jazz music she had heard. The lake sparkled as before, but there was no sign of Friede or her boat. Instead, the water was dotted with sleek pleasure boats, rowed by gentlemen for the pleasure of their female companions, all of whom held fur muffs to protect their hands from the cold.

It was all so beautiful, so idyllic, like looking at a postcard of the past. But there was something strange and surreal about the scene as well. Eve couldn’t escape the thought that all these people, laughing, and boating, and enjoying themselves on the lawn, were now dead. Or at least, they had been before she stepped through the door to Room 27. Dead for many years, just bones in a box or ashes in the air. This knowledge made it somehow uncomfortable to watch them boating, and eating chestnuts, and enjoying their time so freely. Like it would go on forever. Her head gave another dull throb, aching beneath the pressure of trying to make sense of it all.

When she finally tore her eyes away, she approached the vanity table and checked every drawer for any sign of writing paper. There was nothing there or in the bedside cabinet. She glanced at the door and felt tempted to turn the key anticlockwise in the lock and see if a ruined corridor awaited her on the other side but decided against it. She didn’t want to risk crossing the threshold by accident and checking out prematurely. She wondered briefly what would happen at that moment. Would she forget that she’d discovered Room 27? Would she believe that the stories about the hotel were all pure fantasy? There were too many questions and she had answers to none of them. But the party would start soon and she didn’t want to miss Anna’s speech.

She went into the adjoining bathroom. It was like stepping inside a pearl, with a shimmer of creamy tiles and a stunning claw-foot bathtub that looked big enough to swim in. She ran the taps and there was just time to sink into a tub of warm water and wash the grime from her skin and hair.

When she dried herself and returned to the bedroom, the jazz had stopped, and upon glancing out the window, she saw that the boats had all been moored, the chestnut cart was gone, and few people remained on the lawn below. She supposed they were all in their own rooms by now, getting ready for the evening. She returned to the wardrobe. Alfie had said it had clothes for every occasion, so she was expecting a full rack when she opened the doors—rows of silks, and velvets, and chiffons, and stripes.

Instead, a solitary dress hung from a hanger. It was all satin silk and lace, in black and liquid gold, a slinky bias-cut gown made for a Hollywood goddess. It was the same dress as the one she’d seen in the photo. There were easily a couple of metres of pearls in the necklace looped over the hanger too. For a long moment, Eve stared. It was utterly stunning, but she couldn’t possibly wear it. The material plunged so low at the back that her entire body would be on show from her shoulders right down to the base of her spine. What if her octopus decided to wander?

Eve’s tattoo had not always been a tattoo. It had started out as a pencil sketch, just like the other octopuses. Only this one didn’t limit its exploring to the edges of the sketchbook. It drifted right onto Eve’s hand where it rested on the page, the ink sinking into her skin as it took up its preferred place on her thigh. Eve had been shocked, of course, had wondered whether she ought to attempt to scrub it off. But she could never bring herself to try. Its presence was comforting and made her feel more like herself. Black turtlenecks seemed like a small enough price to pay for that.

There had never been any long-term romances in Eve’s life, but on the rare occasion when there had been a brief fling, the octopus had mostly remained on her thigh, or else the man in question hadn’t noticed it move. But there was one night with someone she’d met in a bar that had been different, unpleasant. It had been Eve’s birthday and she was desperate to take the edge from her loneliness, to feel the warmth that could only come from another person’s touch. But then he saw the octopus move up her leg.

“What the fuck?”

She could still hear the horror in his voice, still see the appalled look on his face.

“What is that?” he’d demanded, still staring at her like she’d slithered up from a drain.

“I don’t know,” she’d replied honestly.

She had no answers and imagined she never would. Even that night on her birthday, when the man had gathered up his clothes and left her feeling lonelier than ever, she hadn’t been tempted to try to wash away the octopus. If the choice was hers, then she would choose the octopus over a man, every time.

Now, in her room at the White Octopus Hotel, she gazed at the silk dress and couldn’t see an alternative to wearing it. Filthy jeans would attract attention, too. And in a magical hotel filled with impossible things, perhaps the octopus wouldn’t be quite as conspicuous as it was back home. Perhaps people wouldn’t be horrified? Besides which, she knew she would wear this dress because she had already done so. The old photo in her pocket proved that.

But more than that, she wanted the dress, longed to feel the cold silk against her skin, and suddenly she was sick of hiding, sick of pretending to be something she wasn’t. She removed her clothes, and as she did so, her phone fell from her pocket. When she picked it up, she was surprised to see that it remained on at all, but obviously, there was no reception.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps she could use it to take photos of the hotel. That way, even if she forgot about it upon checking out, she would have evidence on her phone. Would that be cheating? Would the hotel find out and, what, impose a penalty of some kind? She decided to think about it later. She switched the phone off to conserve the battery and tucked it into the drawer by her bed before returning to the wardrobe.

She slipped the dress over her head, relishing the way it clung to her body in all the right places. The loop of pearls was so long it reached down to her navel. Placed neatly on the shelf below was a pair of black snakeskin print heels. Silk stockings. Lace underwear and a garter belt, all in black. A lipstick and a hairbrush.

Eve sat at the dressing table to roll the stockings up to her thighs; they reached just to the spot where her octopus was currently resting. She picked up the lipstick and turned towards the mirror, pleased to find it was the blood-red shade she’d always favoured. The hairbrush had a mother-of-pearl back with an octopus motif. When she swept it through her hair, it didn’t only dry it but transformed her hairstyle too. In the blink of an eye, she had thirties-style finger curls, just as she’d done in the photograph. When she opened the wardrobe door to replace the hairbrush, she saw that another item had appeared on the hanger—a black sable coat. She recalled that Alfie had said something about wearing a coat, so she slipped it on.

When she looked in the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe, she didn’t recognise herself. She smiled and her lips were red against white teeth. She could be someone else here if she wanted to be, and no one would have to know. Even she herself wouldn’t know if she forgot everything the moment she checked out. It was an intoxicating thought. Eve allowed herself a small moment of silent triumph. She had done the impossible. She had travelled back eighty years to check in to the White Octopus Hotel. And she was going to undo her past.

Chapter 16

On her way out, Eve took care with the key, making sure to turn it clockwise in the lock. Even so, when the door opened, she half expected to see a ruined shell of a building beyond and to be greeted with the smell of damp and neglect. Instead, an immaculate corridor stretched away from her, containing a double row of closed doors, brass number plates gleaming. The wooden floorboards were a pale golden brown and the wallpaper was elegant stripes—no hint of graffiti, no trace of water damage. It was like seeing her imagined vision come to life. There was even a pair of smart men’s shoes left out to be cleaned partway down the corridor, and a used room service tray awaited collection from Room 28, directly opposite. She turned to look at her own door and saw that the hotel had somehow made room for it. The number on the outside now read 27.

Then there it was again, that smothered giggle, only this time it was more of a chuckle and came from a little girl with freckles and a mop of auburn hair. She was peering out at Eve from the end of the corridor, a look of mischievous delight on her face.

“Boo!” Eve said.

The girl gave a little shriek and scooted off. By the time Eve reached the end of the corridor, she had vanished. A door nearby opened and out stepped a handsome gentleman, with an elegant woman holding his arm, both wrapped up in coats. This was the first woman that Eve had seen up close since she arrived and there was something a bit startling about her appearance. Perhaps it was the tiny rosebud effect she’d achieved with her lipstick, or the Hollywood-starlet brows, which had been heavily plucked and then pencilled back in with an ultra-thin line. It was so different to what Eve was used to and she couldn’t help thinking that it gave the woman the look of a femme fatale.

“Good evening,” the man said politely, tipping his hat in her direction.

Eve managed to return the greeting, her skin tingling with the strangeness of speaking to people from another time. She wondered whether they believed she was one of them, or if her “otherness” was written as plainly on her as it seemed to be on them. They walked off and she followed in their footsteps, feeling a little conspicuous at being unescorted and trying to remember whether this was common in the thirties. Fortunately, the walk didn’t last long because they soon reached the lift.

Unlike in the modern-day ruin, the lift doors were in place, and it was a relief not to be faced with an empty shaft plummeting straight into the darkness. More than that, though, the doors themselves were a delight. Like so many other things from this era, they were special and stunning, surfaced with a veneer arranged in stylised coral and seaweed shapes from a variety of different woods that were no longer common in Eve’s time. She recognised Cuban plum pudding wood, American walnut, and Japanese ash, all combining to create a rich, glossy tapestry of art deco motifs.

To Eve, they were extraordinary, but the couple barely glanced at them before the gentleman pressed the button to summon the lift. Together, they listened to the rumbling clanks and whirs as the lift made its way up to the fifth floor and came to a stop with a sudden clang. The doors slid open to reveal a spectacular birdcage lift with intricate, ornate ironwork moulded into the shape of tentacles. A lift operator in his sixties stood inside, dressed in a similar uniform to the one Alfie had worn, with a green jacket, a round hat, and spotless white gloves.

He slid the gate back and said, “Good evening, sir. Ladies. Going down?”

“Yes, as quick as you can,” the male guest replied. “I’m afraid we’re running late for the event in the Sunset Room.”

“Never fear, sir,” the operator said as the three of them stepped on board. He flicked a quick glance at Eve before his eyes slid away again. “The speech won’t start until you get there.”

A brass panel on the wall contained buttons for floors one to six. The operator selected the ground floor and the lift clanked its way down through the levels until it emerged into the steel cage in the lobby.

The room revealed itself bit by bit and Eve found it impossible not to stare at the splendour, delighted by the sight of the room brought to life, restored to its glory. The graffiti and rubbish were gone, and so were the moss and the insects, the rot and ruin. Beneath lay a stunning lobby, shining in white St. Genevieve marble. There was the sparkle of water running from the fountain and the mirrored piano stood smart and gleaming and all in one piece. A pianist was seated there, and music filled the room. The grandfather clock was polished from top to bottom, ticking and tocking out the minutes as the few remaining stragglers hurried out the front doors in the direction of the party.

Eve was glad of her fur coat then, because the evening was already icy cold. She had no idea where the Sunset Room was, so she followed the other guests as they walked outside and along the veranda to the front of the building, where the manicured lawns were now frosted with a light cover of snow, stretching all the way down to the water’s edge. There wasn’t time to linger because sunset was already painting the lake in fiery shades of orange and yellow, and everyone was heading straight towards the steam baths sprawled on the other end of the lawn.

The grand outbuilding’s front doors stood wide open in welcome. Eve followed the others into a small reception area. She felt a flicker of unease as she checked her fur coat into the cloakroom with the others. She was very aware of the evening air brushing over the bare skin of her back, but her octopus tattoo remained on her thigh for now.

She was directed next door, where it seemed like the entire hotel had assembled in the Sunset Room, leaving only just enough space for Eve to squeeze in at the very back. The sun’s final glow poured in through the massive windows, lighting up the room like it was the inside of a jewel. The walls were lined with golden mirrors, and the floor was tiled with crushed pieces of pearl-pink shell. A marble champagne bar took up the entire wall facing out towards the lake and Eve was mesmerised by the sight of exceptionally elegant guests perched upon the tall stools, holding coupes of golden bubbles as they talked, and laughed, and admired the view beyond. Alive again, after all these years.

A waiter offered her a coupe of champagne from a silver tray, and when she raised it to her lips, she found it was ice-cold and bubbled over her tongue in the most pleasing way—so much better than it had ever tasted at home. Perhaps champagne was meant for the thirties, the perfect complement to the glitz and glamour. Or maybe it tasted better because, for the first time in her life, she could glimpse the possibility of undoing that ghastly mistake and putting things right. She could hardly comprehend what a life unsaddled with a crushing weight of guilt would feel like. She supposed it would be airy and light. She guessed there would be room to enjoy things, and a bold, bright flame of hope warmed her from the inside.

Suddenly, there were gasps of delight all around the room as the sun finally dipped below the horizon and in the moment of its disappearance it cast a final beam of brightness that shone upon a small mirror on the far wall. This mirror had a particularly ornate frame, featuring a host of golden jellyfish, and it must have had magic too, for as the sunset struck the glass, a bloom of jellyfish appeared in the air above the guests’ heads. They were spectral and ghostlike, not quite solid, the colour of molten sunshine, bigger than any real jellyfish could possibly be. They drifted lazily up near the ceiling, their long tentacles trailing down towards the glittering crowd. Eve felt the prickle of her own octopus as it shifted on her thigh. Some of the guests were removing their gloves, reaching up with their bare fingers, trying to touch a tentacle.

“They don’t sting, then?” a nearby guest remarked.

“Oh, they do,” her companion replied. “Rumour has it that if one of them stings you, you’ll be gifted with a piece of knowledge about a loved one—something that they do not want you to know.”

As the sun sank below the horizon, the jellyfish vanished in an instant, and in their place a woman climbed up on a stool at the front of the room, raised her coupe of champagne, and tapped it delicately with a teaspoon. There was a ting-ting-ting and everyone fell quiet and turned towards her.

I know you, Eve thought at once. I know you.

She was a petite woman about Eve’s age, dressed in a violet gown and white elbow-length gloves. She wore a silver necklace in the shape of a single leaf that looked real, except for the fact that it was entirely reflective, like it had been dipped in a mirror. A diamond chain adorned her black hair, which fell down her back in waterfall waves. Eve knew she had never laid eyes on this woman before, but the strong sense of recognition persisted.

There was a bright flash from the other side of the room as a photographer snapped a picture.

“My dear friends,” the woman said. “Welcome to the White Octopus Hotel. For those of you I haven’t yet met, my name is Anna Roth, and I am the current owner. I expect you all know who my father was. This hotel was Nikolas Roth’s great pride and joy—his life’s work, in a sense.” Her voice shook just slightly. “As many of you know, my parents died recently. I miss them every day, but we have exciting times ahead. It was my father’s final wish that the White Octopus Hotel should throw a grand party—grander than tonight, the grandest party of our time—to celebrate its fortieth birthday in three days.”

There was a cheer from the assembled guests and many of them raised their champagne coupes in a toast.

Anna smiled, revealing two cheek dimples, and Eve flinched. Her little sister had had cheek dimples too, just like that….

“In the meantime,” Anna went on, “we invite you to join us in a little scavenger hunt. Some of you may already know that this hotel has twelve clocks and thirty-six octopuses in its public rooms, not including those on our room keys and tableware. To the first guest who manages to locate them all, a prize will be offered on the night of the party. The winner will be rewarded with one of Nikolas Roth’s paintings. And have their pick of any magical item in the hotel.”

There was another enthusiastic burst of applause, but as it fell away, one person continued to clap—deliberately slowly, unmistakably mocking. One by one, everyone in the room turned around, craning their heads to see who this person might be. It didn’t take Eve long to locate him, because he was standing just a few feet from her, leaning against one of the pillars. He stood out because he was perhaps the only person in the room who wasn’t dressed smartly. Instead, he wore a plain, ordinary day suit and fedora. The hat caught Eve’s attention at once. She’d seen one just like it: the hat that was still sitting on the top shelf of her wardrobe at home. She could tell that the man had black hair but couldn’t see his face properly until he turned his head to take the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, and then she felt another jolt of adrenaline rush through her. It was Max Everly, the famous musician, instantly recognisable from the photos, only now he wasn’t a frozen, faded image in black and white, but a living, breathing person right in front of her.

The room fell silent and everyone was looking at him. Despite this, he seemed in no hurry to speak and took a slow drag on his cigarette first. “My congratulations, Miss Roth,” he said at last, exhaling smoke, “on that very pretty speech. Have you ever considered a career on the stage? The West End is in constant need of good actresses, I hear.”

“Thank you, Mr. Everly,” Anna said in a cool tone. Then she deliberately looked away and addressed the party in a far warmer voice. “Please help yourself to scavenger hunt cards by the door. In the meantime, we’ve a lot of champagne that needs drinking tonight, darlings. Enjoy!”

She hopped down from the stool to more applause and then someone put a jazz record onto a vinyl player behind the bar. The odd moment with Max Everly was already forgotten and the festivities were in full swing once more. Eve stood rooted to the spot. Part of her wanted to begin exploring straightaway, to start ticking off the clocks, the octopuses. But then again, now that she was a hotel guest, perhaps she could simply ask someone for a sheet of notepaper? She ought to track down a member of staff at once and do so. If her mind had been less fuzzy, then she would have asked Alfie the moment she arrived.

And yet…she couldn’t take her eyes from Max Everly. It was impossible to tell whether this was the same elderly man who had come to the auction house and pressed the white octopus into her hands, but he was certainly the musician she had loved and admired for years, and Eve longed to speak to him, to say something about how much his music had meant to her, how much it had helped. He was still leaning against a pillar, taking deep drags on his cigarette in a way that seemed angry. Clearly there was something irritating him, and he wasn’t taking any pleasure in the party at all, shaking his head when a passing waiter tried to offer him champagne. But Eve felt herself drawn towards him like a magnet. She took a step closer, with no idea of quite what she would say.

But then someone jostled her arm from behind, there was the cold splash of water on her skin, and a voice said, “Oh, I’m sorry!”

Eve turned and found herself face-to-face with a woman she recognised. She was in her early twenties, with long dark hair, tied up and arranged with jewelled combs. Her velvet dress was a pale shade of forget-me-not blue and couldn’t disguise the fact that she was heavily pregnant. There was a confused moment as Eve tried to place her. She did recognise her, surely, just as she thought she’d recognised Anna, but it was like seeing an actress in a film, knowing that you’d seen them before but unable to work out where.

“Here, take my napkin,” the woman said, offering Eve the piece of cloth for her arm, which was damp from the spilled water.

Hearing her voice again finally made something click inside Eve’s head. All the pieces shuffled themselves around into the correct order, and the breath in her body was gone, and she knew exactly who she was looking at.

The young woman in front of her was her mother.

Chapter 17

Eve reached out, but instead of taking the napkin, she gripped her mother’s hand. She could undo it. She could undo it all right now. She knew her mum had been pregnant with Bella when they’d all come to Switzerland, and she realised now that her mother had done more than visit the abandoned White Octopus Hotel—she’d gone back in time. She’d talked about finding a key to Room 17, so surely she must have found the room too, and figured it out just like Eve had.

“Are you okay?” her mum asked, looking startled by Eve’s grip on her hand.

Don’t do it! Eve longed to say. Oh, God, don’t hold a fourth-birthday party for me, don’t let me near the gate, don’t let Bella out of your sight….

The words tingled right on the edge of her tongue. But guests had to give up their memories when they checked out; that was what Alfie had said. So her mum wouldn’t remember—and didn’t, as had been clear when Eve asked her about the hotel. Although Eve was certain that her mother must have brought her here as a child too. She could see no trace of her three-year-old self now, but maybe she came on a different occasion? For afternoon tea and the peppermint creams. And if Eve had managed to hold on to tiny snatches of memory, then maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that her warning could make a strong enough impression on her mother that she would carry it with her back to her own time?

And yet…

Even if Eve’s mum had some vague recollection of the warning, it wouldn’t be enough unless she remembered the specifics. Worse still, it might leave her with an uncertain, disturbing premonition of disaster that she had no power to avoid. And in this moment, here and now at the party, it would be upsetting and cruel. What pregnant woman wanted to hear that the baby they were carrying wouldn’t live to see its second birthday?

“I—I’m sorry,” Eve finally stammered out, releasing her mum’s hand and taking the napkin instead. “I just…had a funny turn.”

She hoped her mum might accept the vague, foolish answer as something a woman from the thirties might say. And after all, it was the truth. Looking at her mother standing there, even younger than Eve currently was herself, was twisting her brain up into knots.

Her mum still looked a little puzzled but nodded and said, “Isn’t this a glorious place?”

“Yes,” Eve replied. “Glorious.”

“Have you visited before?” her mum asked politely.

“Once,” Eve replied. “When I was very young. I’m Eve, by the way.”

Her mum smiled. “That’s my daughter’s name. I’m Jane.”

It was so utterly strange to be talking to her mum like this. She seemed incredibly—shockingly—young. No grey hairs, no lines forged with suffering.

“You must be a relation,” Jane said.

Eve felt the colour drain from her face. “Pardon?”

“To Anna Roth, I mean. You look so alike.”

Eve’s head ached. Did they look alike? Was that why Anna had seemed familiar to her?

“Just coincidence,” Eve said firmly. She longed to tell Jane who she really was, but in the absence of being able to do so, she settled for prolonging their conversation a little more, trying to establish the flimsiest of connections between them.

“What do you make of the scavenger hunt?” Eve asked. “Do you think you’ll join in?”

“Oh. Well, I can’t really,” Jane replied, shaking her head. “I’ve got…My husband and daughter are waiting for me, and I’ve another little one on the way soon too, as you can see. So I can’t stay long.”

Her hands strayed to her stomach. Even now, baby Bella was there, right there, safe inside her mother. Eve felt the sudden mad urge to reach out and touch the bump, to say sorry to her little sister, to promise to make things right….

But then a man’s voice rang out, raised in irritation. “By all means! Why let the truth get in the way of a good yarn?”

Eve and Jane both glanced around to see Max Everly talking to Anna Roth. And that was when Eve saw the rabbit—her sister’s rabbit—only it wasn’t sat at the sidelines, like usual. It was in Anna Roth’s arms, its long ears pricked up tall, its little nose snuffling and twitching in alarm.

Eve stared. How had the rabbit managed to get into the arms of a real person? That wasn’t how it normally worked. If no one else was aware of the rabbit, then didn’t they all wonder why Anna was holding her arms in that strange way?

But then Anna said, “Please lower your voice, sir. You’ll frighten my rabbit.”

And Eve saw that it wasn’t Bella’s rabbit, not quite. This one had a splodge on its left eye rather than its right, like a mirrored version. Anna bent to place the bunny on the floor, and it immediately hopped off through the crowd in search of a quiet corner.

“I’d better go find the bathroom,” Jane said, drawing Eve’s attention back. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Oh, yes. You, too.”

Jane disappeared from the room in one direction and Anna ushered Max out the other. Once again, Eve took a step after the musician, but before she could get any further, an ancient woman hobbled straight up to her, as if she’d been waiting for the opportunity. She was extremely old, in her nineties at least, yet there was something bright and capable about her. Her hair was completely white, tied up with combs, and her skin was wrinkled and spotted with age, but she approached Eve with an air of purpose, moving slowly but unaided in her dove-grey evening gown.

“Good evening, miss,” she said without preamble. “You must be the guest from Room 27. I work at the hotel, so I know you’ve come a long way to join us.”

Eve glanced down at her outfit. Perhaps she wasn’t blending in so well as she’d hoped, after all.

“I’m sure none of the guests will have any idea about where you’re from,” the woman said briskly, as if reading Eve’s mind. “It’s just some of the longer-term staff who learn to recognise the sevens.”

“Sevens?”

“Our time-travelling guests.” The woman’s voice wavered, and Eve had to lean forwards slightly to hear her over the jazz and general hubbub of laughter and conversation. “You always have rooms with sevens in them.”

“How many of us have there been?” Eve asked, glancing in the direction in which Jane had just left.

“A few. We have three time-travelling rooms, although Room Seven’s key was recently lost, I’m afraid. I see you just met our other occupant, though. If there are multiple sevens in the hotel at any one time, then they often find themselves drawn together for some reason. I’m the hotel’s resident historian.”

“How fascinating,” Eve replied. Max and Anna had both disappeared from view now, and she was disappointed to have let them slip away again.

“It is,” the woman replied. “For any hotel, but for the White Octopus in particular.”

Eve turned her attention back to her. She was a member of staff, after all, so there was no harm in asking. “I wonder if you could help me,” she said. “I’d like to send a letter and was hoping the hotel might have some writing paper I could use?”

The old woman tilted her head slightly to one side, giving Eve an appraising look with her rheumy eyes. “Now, whyever would a seven want to send a letter? Surely you will have no one to write to in the world for many years.”

“I’ve heard that it’s special writing paper,” Eve replied. “Is that true?”

“Everything in this hotel is special,” the woman said, before adding abruptly, “I’m much too old for parties—too noisy and boisterous. Will you take afternoon tea with me tomorrow? I’m always fascinated by our sevens. A historian doesn’t normally get the opportunity to learn about histories other than their own. I would love to hear more. And in return I’ll happily tell you about the hotel.”

“All right,” Eve said, trying to hide her disappointment. She supposed it was too much to hope that the paper could simply be handed to her, but she could always ask the other staff in the meantime. “Thank you.”

“Meet me at the Veranda Restaurant at three o’clock,” the woman ordered. “Ask for Mrs. Roth’s table.”

Eve was startled to hear the name again, but before she could ask any questions about the woman’s relationship to Nikolas Roth, the old lady had bid her good night and was slowly making her way towards the exit.

Eve went to pick up one of the scavenger hunt cards. A title in elaborately ornate script read The White Octopus Hotel Scavenger Hunt. Beneath this were two headings, one for clocks and one for octopuses. A numbered list below provided space for guests to write down the location of each. Sketches of tentacles and ticking clocks adorned the margins. Eve picked up a small pencil from a silver bucket beside the cards and wrote in the answers she already knew. In the lobby there was one grandfather clock and one octopus fountain. Only eleven clocks and thirty-five octopuses to go. She considered returning to the hotel straightaway to begin the search but found herself drawn back by the conversation of the other guests.

Over the next hour, the champagne flowed, and the photographer’s camera flashed, and there was a great deal of talk about the hotel’s magical objects too. According to the guests, these really existed at the hotel—not just one or two, but an abundance of them, and everyone was keen to compare notes and experiences and to talk about what they would claim as their prize if they won the scavenger hunt.

“Personally, I just adore the bookmark,” a lady in a lemon-coloured gown said. She wore stacks of bangles over her gloves that jingled every time she moved. “It’s difficult to find in the library, but if you manage to get hold of it, then it can bring a fictional character to life. When I visited a few years ago, I had breakfast with Sherlock Holmes.”

“My dear, that can’t actually be true!” another lady wearing a jewelled headdress replied. “Can it?”

“I swear it happened.”

“But how delightful!” The woman in the headdress clapped her hands together.

“It isn’t all delightful,” a gentleman warned. “The bookmark is dangerous. You don’t decide which character is brought to life, you see. A friend of mine found himself face-to-face with Dr. Jekyll once and it was devilishly unpleasant. It’s lucky no one was killed.”

“There’s a mirror in the Smoking Room,” another man volunteered. “Whatever you do, don’t look into it for too long.”

“What harm can a mirror possibly do, old fellow?” a second gentleman asked.

The first man shook his head. He’d gone a little pale. “If you stare into the glass for too long, then something happens. To your reflection.”

“What rot!” someone replied with a merry laugh. “Everyone knows that your face starts to look unlike your own if you stare at it for too long.”

“No,” the man insisted. “No. It’s more than that. Your reflection, it…comes to life. And you might not like what it does.”

“Choose your words carefully in the Palm Bar too,” another guest cautioned. “The martinis are excellent, of course, if you can tolerate the Eavesdropper hiding behind the curtains. They say he coughs every time someone utters a lie. You only ever see the tips of his shoes. Unless a truly shocking lie of great magnitude is uttered, and then you might glimpse a finger curling around the edge of the curtain—or so they say.”

“But who is he?”

“No one knows.”

“That can’t be right,” Eve put in. “There are no windows in the Palm Bar, so why would there be a curtain?”

The man shrugged. “All I know is there is one.”

“Well, no one eavesdrops on me,” a second man said with a chuckle. “I’d soon have him out by his ear, whoever he is.”

The other man shuddered again. “I wouldn’t pull that curtain back. Not for the world.”

Eve soaked up as many details as she could. If even half of what the guests were saying was true, then the hotel really was an extraordinary place indeed.

She saw Jane in the crowd once or twice, but they didn’t find themselves together again.

Eventually, the guests donned their fur coats and the gathering spilled out onto the lawn, beneath the stars. The event was finishing with a dramatic fireworks display over the lake, but Eve had learned all she could from the other guests for now and had no interest in fireworks. She was told that the steam baths were closing for the night, so it was time to return to the hotel and begin her search for its clocks and octopuses.

Chapter 18

It was approaching midnight, and the corridors were quiet. Most of the guests were still finishing their champagne out on the lawn. Eve returned to reception and was glad to find the desk manned by a night porter.

“How can I help you, madam?”

“I need to write a letter,” she said. “Is there any paper available?”

“You could try the Writing Room,” the porter replied, indicating the corridor on the other side of the desk. “Three doors down. I fear there might not be any paper left, though. The hotel’s writing paper is rather special and…in great demand.”

Eve paused. “Will it be restocked? Where does the paper actually come from?”

The night porter smiled and raised both hands in a little shrug. “You’d have to ask Anna Roth about that, madam.”

“All right. Is there anywhere I can leave my coat?”

It was far too hot inside for fur.

“I’ll gladly check it into the cloakroom for you.”

Eve handed it over and crossed the room towards the door he’d indicated. It was impossible not to pause beside the fountain, though, taking a moment to appreciate it now that it was back in working order. The second she paused, there was a click and flash behind her, and she turned to see the photographer she’d noticed earlier at the party.

“I hope you don’t mind, madam,” he said, meeting her gaze. “Anna Roth asked me to take as many photos of the guests and hotel as possible to mark the occasion.”

Eve shrugged. She’d already seen the developed photo, had it even now tucked into the pocket of her jeans upstairs. It was a striking image. She left the photographer in the lobby and went down the corridor to the Writing Room. It was a small, snug space, with a couple of polished wooden desks. Placed upon each was a silver pen, an inkwell full of shining, dark ink, and a glowing lamp. There was a stack of crisp white envelopes but not a scrap of writing paper to be found, either on the desk or in any of the drawers.

The quiet hush was pleasant after the noisy hubbub of the Sunset Room, and Eve lingered there for a moment. She reflected on the fact that, so far, the 1930s hotel she had seen very closely matched the sketches she’d made of the White Octopus back home—only with a lot more magic.

When she headed back out to the corridor, she saw that the plaque on the room opposite read Painter’s Room and this one at least was well stocked. When Eve stepped inside, she found prepared easels, tins of paints, boxes of pencils and charcoal. Everything an artist could wish for, including windows that looked straight out upon the moonlit lake. A sign invited guests to help themselves to art materials and Eve saw that some of the artwork from previous guests had been hung on the walls here too. Many of the drawings were of the lake and the mountains, although there were some of the hotel as well. There were no clocks or octopuses, though, so she left to search for the ballroom and its glass chandeliers. There were, she recalled, small glass octopuses hanging from them. She couldn’t remember the exact number she had seen while exploring the ruined hotel—though even if she could, it might not be accurate after all the years of rot and ruin. Best to re-count them for herself, now.

As she walked through the deserted hotel, she wondered whether she had perhaps had too much champagne, because the corridors seemed to stretch endlessly in front of her in a dreamlike fashion. It was clear that they’d once been hung with paintings, but these had all been removed, leaving only faded squares on the wallpaper to show where they had been. Only a few black-and-white photographs remained, depicting the hotel and its guests in days gone by. Eve glimpsed different fashions from the Victorian past—men in beards and women in bustles. The hotel itself seemed more sombre back then too, with none of its current art deco flourishes.

Despite her attempts to head for the ballroom, she soon found herself in a totally different part of the hotel, going around in hopelessly lost circles until, finally, she heard the scratch of a jazz record. When she followed this up a flight of stairs, she arrived at the Palm Bar and Martini Room, which was completely transformed from the ruin of a room she had seen before.

The lacquered silver walls gleamed in the glow of the table lamps, broken up with panels of palm-print wallpaper. The bevelled mirrors had lost their tarnish, and the banquettes and armchairs were upholstered in glossy black velvet. A pair of large art deco golden palm trees adorned either side of the bar and the shelves behind it were now fully stocked with a vast array of bottles. The room smelled of the cigar smoke that twisted through it in ribbons. Jazz crackled from the record player, the fireplace was lit, and here, again, Eve noticed the ghosts of paintings in the empty faded squares on the walls. The hotel was the one place where Roth had exhibited his work, and Eve wondered once again why he had refused to let his paintings leave the hotel and what had happened to them all after his death.

A few other guests had retired here for nightcaps, although Eve saw that she was the only woman. It suddenly occurred to her that it might be considered improper for her to be here alone at this time of night. She remembered seeing a collection of old bar signs at the auction house once. No unescorted ladies will be served. Or: Men only from noon until three.

Now she distinctly heard a few tuts from the other male guests and noticed a couple of scowling faces through the haze of cigar smoke. She ignored them and tipped her head back to look at the murals on the ceiling, searching for octopuses amidst the cocktails. Within moments there was a loud throat-clearing sound from an armchair behind her and she saw that one of the guests—a portly older man with an impressive moustache—was beckoning over a barman who was circling the room with a martini trolley. For a moment, Eve thought it was Alfie because they looked so alike, but then she realised that the barman had a slightly thinner face and longer nose. They shared the same ice-blond hair and blue eyes, but she guessed this boy—Luca, according to his name badge—was a year or two older. The drinks trolley he pushed was a beautiful item, with golden art deco lines and burgundy mirrored shelves.

“What’ll you have, sir?” Luca asked, stopping his trolley beside the gentleman guest and the other two men at his table. “Might I recommend the Thin Man martini?”

“I already have a drink,” the guest replied brusquely. “But someone over there is lost. She’s looking for the exit, I believe.”

Eve realised the man was talking about her and turned around to face him. All three of the men at the table were gazing at her in a hostile fashion, and it wasn’t only them. Almost all the other guests were glancing her way in irritation too.

“Are you lost, madam?” Luca asked pleasantly.

A hush descended upon the room. For the first time, Eve noticed that the tables at the back were occupied by hotel staff rather than guests, which seemed a little strange. She recognised the green braid of their uniforms and the flash of white octopus pins. Alfie sat at one table with the lift operator and another man in his thirties she hadn’t seen before. And there were a couple of waiters from the Sunset Room. They were all staring straight down at their drinks rather than her, and there was no easy chatter over their cocktails, only silence, as if they were waiting to hear what she might say, waiting to see what would happen next. A shivery prickle ran up Eve’s arms and suddenly she had the sense that something was about to happen. Something momentous.

Perhaps the sensible thing would have been to leave gracefully. She was a guest in their time period, after all. And yet, the way the men were looking at her with such open dislike made her want to dig her heels in, to be obstinate, to make herself an inconvenience.

“I’m not lost,” she said calmly. “This is exactly where I want to be.”

There was another blustery throat-clearing noise from the older guest. “Be that as it may, young lady, a cocktail bar at midnight is no place for you.”

He wagged his finger, and Eve let out a bark of a laugh. This seemed to incense the man and his companions even further.

“Please be so good as to remove yourself,” he said tersely. “No decent woman would wish to be present at this hour.”

But I am no decent woman, Eve thought. Can’t you tell? My sins would make you shudder.

The octopus tattoo on her thigh burned as the tentacles stretched down towards her ankle, like a muscle suddenly flexing.

“All guests are welcome at the Palm Bar, sir,” Luca replied politely. “Nikolas Roth insisted on it.”

The man looked affronted and there were grumbling noises from the other guests too. “What? What? What kind of place is this? One simply cannot have unescorted females wandering in.”

“May I ask why not?” Luca asked.

“Don’t you cheek me, boy! You know perfectly well why not. It’s not proper! It despoils the barroom atmosphere. It—”

“The only person despoiling the atmosphere at the moment is yourself, old fellow,” someone said from the bar. “Please be so good as to stop talking. I’ll gladly escort the lady if it will put a stop to your jabbering.”

Eve turned around and noticed for the first time that Max Everly sat on a bar stool. One elbow rested on the bar beside his fedora and he was looking at Eve with a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. But as she met his gaze, the look vanished, to be replaced with one of absolute shock, before he gave a slight shake of his head, and his expression became neutral once again.

“Well, how about it, miss?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “I can recommend the Aviation.”

Eve nodded, even though she would have preferred a neat whiskey. “Why not? I haven’t tried one before.”

“I won’t stay,” the older man announced. “Not under these circumstances. Not for anyone.”

He heaved himself up from his chair and the other men at his table did the same. One by one, all the male guests got up and walked out the door. Nobody tried to stop them. Max Everly reached forwards to pull out a bar stool for Eve. She could hardly believe it as she sat down beside him. He really was right there, the man whose music had meant so much to her over the years.

He glanced at her as she took her seat. “So,” he said conversationally. “Are you real?”

“Excuse me?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. I apologise. It’s only that I get faces muddled up sometimes. Have done ever since the war. You remind me of someone I used to know. Have we met?”

Yes, Eve wanted to say. I have known you for years….

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I was hoping to meet you properly, Mr. Everly.”

“Ah.” He looked suddenly dubious. “Now, don’t tell me. I insulted a friend of yours at a party, or I owe money to your brother, or I made an improper suggestion to your—”

“No, nothing like that,” she said. “I only wanted to say that I love your music.”

The words were inadequate, feeble, and she felt a wave of frustration at herself for wasting this opportunity, for being so vanilla and ordinary and dull, when she was really none of those things. All of a sudden, she hoped that her octopus would take this moment to appear, to move its tentacles over her skin in a lazy caress—something she had never wished for before in her life. Normally, she was at pains to blend in, but she desperately wanted to stand out to Max Everly. In front of him, she wanted to be nothing more or less than who she truly was.

He reached into his inner jacket pocket and brought out a box of Player’s cigarettes. “You’re too kind.”

“I owe you a thanks as well,” she pushed on, trying again. “Your music got me through a…difficult time.”

Max gestured with the cigarettes. “Do you object?”

She shook her head. He took one from the box, lit the end, and took a drag. “Music will do that,” he said, breathing out smoke. He reached into the box to slip out the cigarette card. Eve saw that it was Zorah from the Gilbert and Sullivan collection. Max regarded it for a moment before slipping it into his shirt pocket. She longed for a smoke herself and realised she should have packed more cigarettes.

She couldn’t prevent her eyes from straying to his fedora, right there on the bar beside her. Her fingers burned to snatch it up and turn it over to inspect the label inside. Would it have those monogrammed initials with the musical note? Could it be possible?

“Your Aviation, madam.”

The bartender—a tall, muscular man in his late thirties, whose name badge read Harry—set a lilac-coloured drink in front of her in a martini glass frosted with ice. It was garnished with a brandied cherry so dark it was almost black. A scent of sharp lemon and Parma violets floated up from the glass. As Eve reached for the drink, she deliberately wobbled slightly on her stool so that her elbow knocked Max’s hat to the floor.

“Sorry,” she said, quickly hopping down to retrieve the hat before Max could do so.

She scooped it up and flipped it over and there it was, the label she knew well—a monogrammed M and E, along with a single musical note. Her whole body tingled as she stared down at it. It was the same hat that she currently had in her wardrobe in her flat at home—the very same one. She recalled the moment when the elderly man had shuffled in, the flash of recognition in his eyes when he looked at her, the way his hand had tightened around hers. He’d recognised her because they had already met many decades before, in the White Octopus Hotel.

Sometimes the end is also the beginning….

Wordlessly, Eve handed him the hat. Max set it back on the bar and gave her a close look, the neglected cigarette dangling between his fingers. “Tell me,” he said. “Did you have relatives here at the hotel? During the war, I mean? An aunt, perhaps?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t believe so.” She quickly reached for her drink, eager to give her hands something to do and her eyes something to focus on other than Max Everly. He was still staring at her in a strangely intense fashion.

“This seems an odd place for them to put the bar,” she said, keen to say something.

“How so?”

“It’s one of the only rooms with no windows at all. I would have thought they’d have chosen a room with a view of the lake.”

Max shrugged. “Sometimes in life you want champagne and sunshine, and at other times you want darkness and books. Or darkness and martinis, as the case may be.”

“Huh.”

They both looked up at this grunt from the barman.

“You disagree?” Max asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No, sir. It’s only that my father used to say the same thing. Sometimes darkness is more comforting than sunlight.”

“Sensible fellow,” Max replied. He nodded at Eve’s cocktail. “Verdict?”

“It’s delicious,” Eve replied. It might not have been whiskey, but she relished the cold bite of the alcohol and the unusual taste of flowers and citrus.

He gave a small half smile. “It was invented by a friend of mine.”

“Oh? Back in London?”

Slowly he shook his head. “Hugo tended the bar at a hotel in New York. German fellow, but we won’t hold that against him since he fought on our side. We met in the trenches, actually.”

“Are you still in touch?” Eve asked.

“No.” Max exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He shot himself. A few years back.”

“Oh. I’m very sorry.” Eve felt that sense of frustration again. Her words were too bland, she might as well have been reading a script, yet what else was there to say? What else was there to do? There were so many ways that a life could go wrong.

Max shrugged. “The good times don’t last. That’s what Hugo always said. He was very proud of that cocktail, though—until prohibition came along, anyway, and he lost his job and then his wife died. There’s only so much misfortune one fellow can take. Perhaps if he’d never married, then he might have stood a chance.”

“You don’t think it better to have loved and lost and all that?”

“Certainly not. It opens you up to too much misery. And I don’t believe in marriage anyway. It isn’t logical.”

Eve wasn’t surprised to hear him say so. She knew of his reputation as a womaniser, had seen a different woman on his arm in almost every one of the old photos. He clearly had a type; they were always platinum blondes.

“I mean, you marry some woman,” he went on, “and you vow to honour and love her for the rest of your days, but she won’t stay the same person and nor will you, so how can you possibly promise to love a person you haven’t yet met?”

“True enough,” Eve replied. “People do not remain the same.”

Personally, she agreed with his position. The only thing worse than what Max was describing was the alternative. Suppose two people did continue to love each other through the decades, that those feelings somehow survived over the years, only to creep ever closer to the moment when they must part ways forever? How could anyone survive such a thing? Far better to remain forever alone.

“Still,” Max said, “it always makes me happy to see an Aviation on the menu somewhere. And I know Hugo would have been especially glad to see a beautiful woman enjoying it.”

Eve almost—almost—felt beautiful in this incredible dress, with this lipstick, in this extraordinary place. But she knew that she wasn’t. Beautiful women were softer. Beautiful women smiled. They did not have blood on their hands. And they did not have octopuses drifting around their skin.

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, stating the fact bluntly.

Max glanced at her. “Perhaps not,” he acknowledged. “But you’re interesting. And that’s infinitely preferable.”

Eve allowed herself the smallest of smiles, pleased that he hadn’t contradicted her. What use was a compliment about her looks? She’d far rather be thought of as interesting.

“Are you taking part in the scavenger hunt?” she asked.

Max’s expression clouded. “I am not. I didn’t come here for that.”

“What did you come for then?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

Eve was about to ask who when the expression on Max’s face suddenly changed, and he stubbed his cigarette out vigorously in a nearby ashtray.

“Well, well. Don’t look now,” he said, nodding towards the corner of the room, “but our eavesdropping friend has joined us.”

Disregarding his words, Eve twisted to look over her shoulder. And for the first time she noticed the curtain, conspicuously covering one wall on the other side of the bar. A place a curtain had no right to be because there was no window there or anywhere else in the room. The material was a very dark blue, the colour of deep depths in a cold sea. Recalling what people had been saying at the party in the Sunset Room, Eve’s eyes went down to the bottom of the curtain, which stopped just shy of the floor. A pair of men’s shoes were indeed poking out from beneath it.

“This place hosted sick POWs from German camps during the war,” Max remarked suddenly, glancing at the barman before looking back at Eve. “Did you know that?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I think I did read that somewhere.”

“Most of the nurses were Swiss,” Max said, “but there was a British matron from the Red Cross, assisted by a VAD.”

“VAD?”

“Voluntary Aid Detachment.” Max looked over at the curtain again and the pair of shoes poking out from underneath. Then he leaned across the bar, looking right at the barman. “Tell me, Harry,” he said, speaking in a voice that was calm but somehow dangerous too. “Do you know what happened to the VAD who worked here?”

Harry paused in the act of polishing a glass. His eyes flicked just once towards the curtain in the corner before they darted away again.

“No, sir,” he said quietly. “I do not.”

And there it was from behind the curtain—a small, but audible, cough.

Chapter 19

Max kept his eyes fixed on the barman. “I stayed at this hotel for more than six months in 1918,” he said, “and I saw her every day.”

Harry carefully set down his empty glass. “The war is over, Mr. Everly,” he said quietly. “The nurses all left many years ago.”

Eve glanced over at the curtain again. It was impossible not to stare at those feet sticking out from beneath. The shoes looked as if they had once been smart but were now severely scuffed and scratched and wearing thin around the toes. They were completely, perfectly motionless and she might have thought there wasn’t a person behind the curtain at all if it wasn’t for the cough.

The cough, Eve recalled one of the guests saying, that signalled a lie.

“The war’s been over for seventeen years,” the barman added.

“I know when the war ended,” Max said coldly. “You were there, on the station platform that day, weren’t you? You knew her.”

The barman cleared his throat, with another anxious glance towards the curtain and those shabby shoes. “I never said that there weren’t any nurses here, Mr. Everly,” he said. “I’m only trying to point out that it was a long time ago. The woman you’re speaking of probably returned to her family.”

“She wrote to me a week ago, asking me to meet her at the hotel. So where is she? People don’t vanish into thin air.”

Beside him, Eve winced. People did vanish into thin air. That very thing was going to happen to Max himself. Perhaps she should say something, try to warn him. Harry glanced at the curtain again, then turned back to Max and shook his head.

“I don’t know.” He whispered the words, but the Eavesdropper still heard them.

There was another round of coughing from behind the curtain, much worse than before. It was like no cough that Eve had ever heard. There didn’t seem to be any relief in the act; it was just a hacking, hopeless sound that went on and on and made the hairs on the back of her arms stand up. It almost didn’t sound like a human cough at all. The remaining staff in the room had fallen silent. The only sound came from the unseen person behind the curtain, spluttering and choking in that awful, desperate manner. Eve stood up abruptly and walked straight to the curtain. A single bony finger curled around the edge of the fabric. The gesture that was rumoured to speak of a great lie. A monumental lie. But what? His skin looked grey and there was black dirt wedged beneath his nails.

Behind her, Luca cleared his throat and said, “It’s best to leave well enough alone, miss.”

She ignored him, keeping her eyes fixed on the curtain. There was something very dreadful about the cough, the shabby shoes, and the clutching finger, but she reached out and laid her hand gently against it.

“Can I do anything?” she asked quietly. “To help you?”

The finger jerked slightly at her touch and then an entire hand snaked around the curtain, thin and grey and cold, covered in weeping sores, and gripped hold of Eve’s hand. She heard the scrape of chair legs as a couple of staff members stood up behind her, uttering startled exclamations, but Eve already knew somehow that the Eavesdropper wasn’t dangerous. He was just afraid and alone, had been like that for too long, and was now lost in the dark. She held on to his hand for several stretched-out moments, and everyone was relieved to hear the terrible cough from behind the curtain start to lessen and eventually subside altogether. Then, with one final squeeze, the hand released her and slipped back behind the folds of the curtain.

“Damned unnatural place,” Max said. Eve turned to see him on his feet, picking up his fedora. He put it back on his head, then nodded in her direction. “You have nerves of steel, madam, but a word of advice: Don’t stay for the scavenger hunt. Don’t stay here at all. Check out of the White Octopus now. While you still can.”

“Mr. Everly—” Eve began.

But Max only tipped his hat. “Good night.”

He walked past her and out the door. Eve glanced back at the remaining staff in the room and saw that they were still looking fixedly at their drinks. She was tempted to approach Alfie and ask what the deal was, why they were all acting so bizarrely, but she wanted to continue her conversation with Max. So she turned towards the door, glancing at the curtain as she strode past. The shoes, and whoever was wearing them, had gone. When she emerged into the corridor, she saw Max stride around the corner. She quickened her pace and caught up with him as he entered another room.

The sign on the door read Fountain Room. Eve followed him over the threshold and stared at walls fashioned from glass panels, with numerous fountains positioned in between a collection of orange trees. The air smelled of citrus and all around there was the splash, splash of water cascading and tumbling, scattering a dance of diamond reflections across the mirrors. The windows looked out towards the magnificent steam baths, striking and splendid in the starlight. Eve glimpsed a few final partygoers still out there, drinking champagne on the lawn in their fur coats.

There was every manner of fountain within the room. Some were large and freestanding, while others were shallow basins attached to the walls. There were several octopuses here—on the fountains themselves and depicted upon the floor tiles. She hastily added them to her list. That made thirty-one still to go.

Max stood beside a medium-sized bronze fountain sporting a large galleon that was balanced precariously on the very edge of a gigantic wave.

Eve walked over. “Mr. Everly. What I’m about to say will sound strange and I imagine you won’t like it much, or even believe me, but for the sake of my conscience I’ve got to tell you that one day—one day fairly soon—you will disappear.”

He glanced at her through the spray of the fountain, one eyebrow raised. “Disappear?”

“You become a missing person. No one ever finds out what happened to you.”

He didn’t look concerned, and why should he? Eve knew she was only making herself sound like a lunatic.

“So you’re, what?” he asked in a bored tone. “A fortune teller?”

“Something like that.”

“Perhaps you can peer into your crystal ball and tell me what became of my friend?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Everly, but I’m chasing my own ghosts. I don’t have the time or energy for anyone else’s.”

She could hear Bella, giggling as she ran amongst the fountains. As always, Eve wanted to shudder but forced herself not to. She would not show weakness. She would not acknowledge her sister at all.

Max walked around to join her. “You know,” he said, “after all this time, I still see my friends who fought with me in France. I see them walking down the street, or mixing drinks in bars, even though they’ve been dead for seventeen years. So perhaps it is that. Of course, that must be the explanation. But your eyes…Are you quite certain that none of your relatives worked here during the war?”

Eve shook her head. “They couldn’t have.”

“You simply must be related. Either that or I’m imagining you, which is also quite possible.”

“What was the nurse’s name?”

“Her name was Eve. Eve Shaw.”

Chapter 20

Max—November 1917

It was a cold, wet, cheerless day when Max first came across the name Eve Shaw.

“Parcel come for you, sir.” His batman, William, tossed it over.

Max’s mother sent him food boxes on a regular basis, along with the occasional serviceman’s hamper from Harrods. She’d even sent one of those ghastly little fumsup charms, which Max had then felt duly obliged to carry. He hoped it would be food this time, or cigarettes, and not a lucky trinket. When he tore off the wrappings, he found a box of Lindt chocolates underneath, but the accompanying card wasn’t from his mother. It read simply To Max. From Eve Shaw.

He frowned down at the name. He’d never heard of an Eve Shaw. He thought back through the various social functions he’d attended at home, the girls he’d danced with or spoken to, but he simply couldn’t recall ever once meeting an Eve.

“Kept this one close to your chest, didn’t you?”

Max glanced around to see Second Lieutenant Rupert Lawson had entered the dugout and was peering over his shoulder, smirking at the note. Rupert was seventeen, a couple of years younger than Max, tall and gangly with red hair and a freckled face. He elbowed Max in the ribs. “Thought you didn’t have a sweetheart back home.”

“I don’t.” Max shrugged and rummaged through his bag for a box of Black Cat cigarettes. “It’s probably someone’s old granny who’s got confused and sent it off to the wrong chap.”

“A likely story!” Rupert scoffed. “What kind of chocolate is it, anyway? I wonder if Mabel would like it.”

“I’m not sure you should be feeding chocolate to a duck,” Max said doubtfully as he opened the cigarettes. “It can’t be good for her.”

“If you’re that much of a duck expert, then go find your own,” Rupert replied. “She likes trench cake well enough, doesn’t she?”

Rupert had a fiancée back home—a girl called Betty, who lovingly baked and sent him a trench cake almost weekly. Max slid the cigarette card from the box. Black Cat were running a Women at War Work collection, which many of the men were collecting.

“Grocer’s Assistant,” he said, looking down at the card. “I’ve already got it.”

“I’ll swap you for the Milk Woman,” Rupert replied.

Max nodded. “Look, you’d best move that duck before Thomas gets back.” He nodded towards the corner of the room, where the duck in question was perched on top of Thomas’s prized gramophone. “There’ll be hell to pay if it shits on one of his records.”

“Come along, old girl.” Rupert scooped up the duck. “Come have a chocolate. I say, are there any dark ones?”

“Help yourself.” Max pushed the box over.

He barely gave it a second thought in the days that followed, but the gifts continued to arrive. Every week or so there would be another parcel. Sometimes it might contain chocolates, others it would be a box of Maria Mancini cigars, which happened to be a great favourite of John’s. Officers always shared their gifts in the mess, but Max was especially pleased to be able to do so with the three other junior officers he’d become close with. Aside from Rupert there was Lieutenant John Waugh, a twenty-four-year-old, softly spoken solicitor. He wore a neat pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and wrote home to his mother every week to anxiously enquire about the health of his elderly tortoise, Herbert.

“I don’t know who your mystery girl is, but these cigars are absolutely first-rate,” he said, delighted.

“Almost gets rid of the taste of petrol.”

Their drinking water was transported in petrol cans and the taste of it never quite went away. Chloride of lime tended to get stuck in the back of the throat too. Rich cigars, with their flavours of leather, and wood, and nuts, were infinitely preferable. On another momentous day, Eve sent a box of ragtime records, an entire box—a gift that equally delighted both Max and his friend, twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Thomas Jones. Thomas was the best person to be with in a dugout because of the gramophone he’d brought from home. He hoped to be a professional saxophonist once the war was over, preferably on board a transatlantic liner as a member of the shipboard orchestra.

The day the ragtime records came, Max and the others were so thrilled that they decided to throw a dinner party in their dugout. Max’s servant, William, rose to the occasion, producing four courses consisting of turtle soup, jam omelettes, mushrooms on toast, and a dessert of apricots and cream, served alongside a bottle of champagne. The food was excellent, the candlelight glowed, and they were warmed by their shared laughter. It was almost like having a party back at his accommodations at the Royal College of Music. Until Rupert lit a cigarette and said, “Say, did you hear what the papers back home are calling us? The officers, I mean?”

“What?” Thomas asked from the corner, where he was replacing the record on the gramophone.

Rupert grinned widely, as if he was about to deliver the punch line of a splendid joke. “The Suicide Club.”

The record stuck and stopped. A silence fell upon the group. Although it wasn’t silence at all, was it? Max heard shells dropping in the distance and—closer to home—the ping of a bullet hitting the parapet, and then another. And the ever-present scuffle of rats scrabbling over the sandbags above them.

“They’re saying an officer lasts a matter of weeks on average,” Rupert went on. “At the front.”

They stared at him. It wasn’t news to any of them, of course, but hearing the words said aloud gave them a different weight. A different flavour. They tasted of petrol and blood. Max put his hand in his pocket, oddly and unaccountably comforted by the smooth wooden head of the fumsup. It was a hideous little thing, but it was a link to his mother, whom he loved more than anyone in the world. And it was a link to normality, and England, and home. A place where things made sense and there wasn’t death and the most sickening violence everywhere you looked.

“You know what my favourite thing about you is, Rupert?” John finally asked, pushing his spectacles up his nose.

“My magic tricks, obviously.”

“Not those, although I must say they’re topping. It’s that you always know precisely the right thing to say to cheer everyone up.”

Max gave a snort of laughter, then Thomas joined in and suddenly everyone was laughing again. But still, Max wished Rupert hadn’t spoken as he had. In that moment he was grateful for the ragtime filling the dugout and the way it helped ease the tremor in his hands. Max was afraid of the war, and he was afraid of the Germans and their shells and their poisonous gas, and he was afraid of the dead bodies of fallen soldiers they sometimes unearthed in the mud. But worse—far worse than all of that—he was afraid of being afraid. One could not be afraid here. One could not. If Max showed fear, then he would be committing the worst sin of all, by letting down his men.

It will be your duty to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, Lord Kitchener had told them.

The gifts from Eve Shaw continued and Max soon unravelled the mystery. One of his company commanders had also been receiving gifts from a girl back home he’d never heard of. But in her accompanying note she’d explained that a photo of some of the officers had been printed in a local newspaper, so a group of the village girls had decided to send little gifts to them at the front.

“Chances are you’ll never meet her in person,” Captain Johnson told him. “Nice enough perk, though, eh?”

Max had to agree. His friends were certainly delighted with the chocolates, and the cigars, and the ragtime records, and Max was especially pleased with the books she sent at Christmas. There was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, and The Time Machine by H. G. Wells—stories that took him far away from the trenches and transported him somewhere else entirely. But the gift he treasured the most—more than the chocolates, or the cigars, or even the ragtime records and books—was an entire box of brand-new candles that Eve sent him. He almost wept with relief when he unwrapped them, because they’d run out in the dugout the night before and he’d been in the trenches long enough by now to know that a candle made all the difference in the dark.

Chapter 21

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

Eve stood in the room of fountains and frowned. “My name is Eve Shaw.”

Max narrowed his eyes. “What new folly is this? A joke or a parlour trick? Either way, it’s in exceptionally poor taste.”

“But my name is—”

“You know, my mother once told me that someone with a palindrome name was probably a witch.”

“A palindrome?”

“A name that’s spelled the same backwards as it is forwards. I do not believe in witches, however, and so you cannot possibly be the woman I’m searching for. Eve was in her twenties when I knew her, so she’d be in her midforties by now. How did you come to be at the hotel?” Max demanded. “What brought you here?”

There was no friendliness or warmth in his gaze now, only suspicion. And suddenly anger too.

Eve hesitated. She saw Max as he would be many years from now, as a very old man, struggling out of the taxi, slowly battling his way up the steps of the auction house, shuffling carefully into her office.

Hello, Eve…

But would he believe her if she told him this? It seemed fantastical even to her.

“I…I heard about the White Octopus from a friend,” she said.

“I don’t believe you,” Max replied at once, his tone blunt. “I can tell when someone is lying to me. And if you’re lying about why you’re here, then I can only assume you’re working with them for some reason.”

“All right.” Eve shrugged. She could feel her octopus tingling its way across the small of her back, in plain sight now if anyone should happen to see her from behind. “You asked for the truth, so here it is: I came to this hotel because you told me to.”

“I told you to?” Max raised an eyebrow. “Madam, I have never laid eyes on you before tonight.”

“One of the rooms in this hotel has a key that allowed me to travel here from another time.”

“Ah, so we’re delving into the realms of H. G. Wells, are we?” Max’s lip curled in contempt. “How fascinating. The main characters in The Time Machine were all unnamed, as I recall; we were only permitted to know them as the Scientist or the Very Young Man and so on and so forth. What ought I to call you then? The Mysterious Woman? The Femme Fatale?”

Miss Scarlett.

The Black Widow.

“I’ve been called worse,” Eve replied. “But I’m telling you the truth. If you believe in the other magical objects here at the hotel, then why is it so impossible to believe in a time-travelling key?”

“I do not believe in magical objects. Look, I’ve heard people here talking about a music box that plays the most beautiful music in the world, but it doesn’t exist; it can’t. Music doesn’t work like that. Since checking in yesterday I’ve asked several times to see this incredible object, but conveniently it is never available.”

“You wanted to ask the barman your questions when the Eavesdropper was behind the curtain,” Eve pointed out. “Why was that if you didn’t believe his coughing meant lies were being spoken?”

“The Eavesdropper is different,” Max replied. “He’s not an object, he’s a person. Or a ghost, more likely. He’s…” He shook his head. “That cough. No actor—no one entirely human—could produce a sound like that.”

“What about the jellyfish in the Sunset Room?” Eve asked. “What do you make of those?”

Max laughed, a short, mirthless sound. “Parlour tricks. Impressive ones, I will grant you, but parlour tricks nonetheless. In my own humble way, I’m something of a magician, and I’m familiar with illusions far more spectacular than that. I’ve seen Howard Thurston perform onstage at the Egyptian Hall in London. He sawed a woman in half, made a horse disappear, and caught a bullet fired from a gun with his bare hands. The gullible amongst the audience were so impressed that they concluded he really must have magical abilities, but the truth is that these tricks simply require a lot of skill, a lot of practice, and a lot of preparation. The truth is that Thurston needed eight train carriages to transport forty tons of equipment. The truth is that nobody can catch a bullet in their hands. Just because people want a thing to be true, it doesn’t make it so. Anyone with half a mind knows this.”

Before Eve could reply, a musical note rang out—clear and pure and perfectly beautiful, played by an instrument she couldn’t identify. A flurry of other notes followed, and she immediately recognised the opening bars of one of her favourites of Max Everly’s songs, a piece called “No Man’s Nightingale.” Max clearly recognised it too and froze. Eve stared around, looking for the source of the music.

Then she saw it wasn’t an instrument playing Max’s music at all; it was water. One by one, musical notes were rising up from the fountains around them. The size of pennies, they sparkled and shimmered in the air, ringing clearer than any bell as they danced throughout the room, playing that tune Eve knew so well. Movement blurred at the windows, and she thought it must be the last partygoers peering in to marvel at the spectacle, but when she turned to look there was no one there. Nothing outside at all except for the mountains and the silence and the steam baths and the stars.

She returned her attention to the music sparkling in the air, felt it press into all those places of her soul that were tender and raw, and it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, but there was something purifying about it too, something healing. Then there was that movement again at the windows, and when she looked this time there was a horse. A grey horse staring at her through the cold glass with warm, dark eyes. For an instant those eyes were the only thing that existed in the world, along with the music. The eyes and the music. The music and the eyes. And the hand holding hers in the dark. And the voice.

Today will be very hard….

People go sometimes. They just go and there’s nothing at all we can do about it….

You can do hard things, Eve….

The music came to an end, the horse vanished, and the musical notes fell like rain. Eve stood surrounded by it, but not a single drop landed on her skin or dress or hair. Yet Max gasped aloud as he was soaked from head to foot in a deluge so tremendous that a wave of water rushed away from him towards the door. And for a moment—just a blink of a moment—it looked to Eve as if the remaining water drops in the air came together to form the shape of a thrashing tentacle, the tip of which flicked towards Max, knocking the hat from his head and straight into Eve’s hands.

And then it was over, and the room was quiet, without even the splish-splash of water since the fountains had all been emptied out upon the floor. The only sound was the drip, drip of droplets falling from Max’s hair and nose and the tips of his fingers. He looked like he had leapt into a swimming pool fully clothed. Eve glanced at the window again, but there was no horse. Had it been real? Had any of it been real? Those words she had heard inside her head. She racked her brain but couldn’t remember anyone in her life ever telling her that she could do hard things. It was true—completely and utterly, painfully true—but she didn’t remember anyone ever saying it to her.

“Might I trouble you for my hat?” Max asked, holding out his hand.

Eve passed it over. She realised then that her fingers were trembling, and unfortunately Max noticed too.

“Something wrong?” he asked with a frown.

She swallowed hard. “No. It’s only that music can…it can make you feel a lot of things at once.”

“That is true.”

“That piece is extraordinary,” she added, her eyes flicking towards the windows. Just black sky and white stars. There were no words to explain what that song had meant to her over the years—how it had helped and healed, even when it had hurt as well.

“How nice that you think so,” Max snapped, gripping the end of his shirt and wringing it out between his hands. “But I would have preferred that Eve Shaw—the real one, I mean—had been the first to hear it, since she was the one I composed it for.”

He left the room without another word to her, squelching with each step. Bella had melted away too, so Eve was left alone with the fountains and her tangle of confused thoughts. Could another version of herself have been here at the hotel almost twenty years ago? Mrs. Roth had told her that there were three time-travelling keys. Perhaps one of them took a person back to the time of the First World War?

But if Eve was successful in finding a sheet of writing paper and preventing Bella’s death, then she would never have come to the White Octopus Hotel in the first place. She would be a different person—entirely ordinary. No time travelling, no octopuses, and no rabbits. If Max was telling the truth, then did this mean she had already failed? Or was it yet another thread of her current life that would be unravelled if she succeeded?

“No Man’s Nightingale” was such astonishing music and the thought that it could have been written for her—even a different version of her current self—was enough to make her tingle all the way down to her toes.

Yet at the same time, there was that ever-present, creeping prickle of shame. It wasn’t right. Music like that didn’t get written for people like Eve.

Chapter 22

When Eve woke the next morning, it took her a minute to remember where she was—and when. Part of her had feared that the hotel might slip away into the night, and she’d find herself back in the abandoned graffitied shell of 2016 wondering if it had all been a dream, or, worse yet, that she’d have no surviving memories of the White Octopus at all. But her elegant bedroom was still there. When she’d arrived back last night, she’d put on the pair of silk monogrammed pyjamas neatly folded at the end of her bed, the same creamy ivory colour as the inside of an oyster shell.

Still wearing these, she went over to glance through the balcony doors. It was early but some of the guests were already up and about, strolling along the water’s edge in fur coats. Eve was eager to continue the scavenger hunt, so she went straight to the walk-in wardrobe. Today it had selected a tailored Lisa Mae shirtwaister white dress, with diagonal jet buttons and a red undercollar. Accompanying it was a polished pair of strapped low heels in black.

She dressed quickly, thinking that it would be hard to go back to jeans after this. Once again, the comb gave her hair the perfect 1930s finger curls and the tube of lipstick remained upon the shelf. She slipped the lipstick and the scavenger hunt card into a skirt pocket before going downstairs to the lobby.

“Are you looking for the Breakfast Room, madam?” the receptionist asked.

Eve took the directions offered and set off down the corridor. Soon enough, she discovered a light, airy room with marble pillars, a black-and-white tiled floor, and scalloped seating upholstered in powder-pink velvet. Geometric mirrors lined the walls, reflecting the blue sparkle of the lake outside. There were several guests there, having breakfast, admiring the view, or reading the paper. A buffet table at one end was piled high with platters of fruit and croissants, rounds of Gruyère cheese beneath glass domes, and shell-shaped bowls full of honey and porridge.

On the wall above the table hung a large golden sunburst clock, with brass dials and thirty-two golden rays. Eve took a plate—lavender-grey with an octopus motif, same as the set she’d found in France. She selected a croissant and some fruit and went over to a free table by the window, where she dug the scavenger hunt card from her pocket and wrote the sunburst clock into place at number two.

She was about to reach for her croissant when she heard a muffled giggle and realised with a jolt that there was someone hiding beneath her table. She quickly pulled the tablecloth up to peer into the grinning face of a little girl—the same child who’d peeked around the door of her room yesterday. She was a bit older than she’d first thought—perhaps four years old—clutching some kind of mechanical toy in her hands.

“Well, small child,” Eve said. “Are you supposed to be down there?”

She’d never had much to do with children and didn’t particularly like them, since they reminded her of Bella. After causing the death of one infant, it had always seemed prudent to stay well away from all others. Eve hoped the girl would leave quickly or that a hassled parent might appear to retrieve her.

The child’s grin widened. “We’re having a mouse concert. Do you want to see?”

“Not especially.”

The girl pressed her finger to her lips. “Shh. Don’t tell anyone; it’s supposed to be a secret. But my mice can play the most beautiful music in the world.”

Eve’s ears pricked up. Could the girl possibly have the music box Victor had spoken of? Hadn’t he said something about mice musicians? She leaned forwards as the child placed her toy on the floor and wound the key with a mechanical clicking sound. Eve recognised it; she’d seen one just like it at Stanley’s a year or two ago. It was the Merrymakers clockwork mouse band by Louis Marx, consisting of four tin mice musicians assembled around a tin lithographed piano decorated in black, cream, and red. The girl pressed a lever, and the four mice sprang frantically to life, enthusiastically bashing at their instruments. But there was no music. No music at all. Only whirs and clicks. Eventually, it wound down and came to a stop.

“Superb,” Eve said coldly. “Now would you mind leaving me to finish my breakfast in peace?”

The girl scrambled out from under the table, still clutching the tin piano. She flashed Eve a grin and said, “My name’s Nan. And I know who you are too. You’re—”

“Nan!”

A voice rang out across the Breakfast Room so loudly that Eve and Nan both jumped. Anna was striding across the room towards them, looking cross. She’d swapped her violet gown of last night for a belted mint-green day dress with two breast pockets, buttoned cap sleeves, and a pleated skirt. Her long black hair was tied up in a chignon bun. Nan didn’t hang around to be scolded; she scurried across the restaurant to join two older boys lingering in the doorway. Eve guessed they must be her brothers because they had the same auburn hair, but she only saw them for a moment before all three disappeared into the hotel.

Anna continued to Eve’s table. “I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling. “The children are under strict orders not to disturb you. Or any of our guests.”

She held an apple in her hand, extraordinarily shiny and red, so perfect that it looked more like a painted apple than the real thing.

“It’s fine,” Eve replied. “But I have a question, actually, while you’re here. I’ve heard a lot about your grandfather’s art and wondered if I might be able to see his paintings.”

Anna raised the apple and bit into it with a loud crunch. She chewed for a moment before swallowing and said, “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The paintings have all been lost.”

“All of them?”

“Well, all but one. And you’d have to win the scavenger hunt to see that. But it’s a very special one. It’s where it all began, you see.”

Eve frowned. “Where what all began?”

Anna flashed a smile again and there were those dimples. “Some say it’s the first artwork Nikolas Roth ever produced at the White Octopus, but I suppose it depends.”

“On what?”

She gave a small shrug. “On whether you look at it from the point of view of the artist or the point of view of the hotel.”

“Do hotels have a point of view?”

“Some believe this one does.” Anna calmly took another bite of her apple.

“What’s it a painting of?”

Anna tilted her head. “I suppose you’ll have to win the scavenger hunt to find out.”

“But what happened to the other paintings?” Eve asked. “Were they stolen?”

It seemed unlikely, given how remote the hotel was. After all, it would be extremely difficult for any thieves to transport a painting back across the lake and down the mountain.

“No,” Anna replied. Up close, the shining silver leaf on her necklace looked even more lifelike. Eve could see every single vein in the blade, delicate and beautiful.

“Are there any clues at all as to what happened?” she pressed.

Anna shook her head and then flashed another smile, exposing her cheek dimples. Eve tried not to think of Bella.

“None at all,” Anna said.

“That’s a great shame.”

“Isn’t it? Well, enjoy your breakfast, Miss Shaw. And good luck with the scavenger hunt.”

Anna turned and walked away without another word, leaving Eve to stare at her retreating back. Max Everly wasn’t the only person who could tell when he was being lied to. Eve was fairly certain that if Anna had spoken those words about the paintings to her in the Palm Bar, in the presence of the Eavesdropper, then there would have been a great deal of desperate coughing indeed.

She finished her breakfast quickly, eager to start the scavenger hunt properly. But on her way out of the Breakfast Room she spotted Jane at a table by herself. Her mother was wearing a lemon polka-dot dress, her plate of fruit untouched before her. She had a pen in her hand and was writing something on a hotel napkin. Eve knew she should probably walk straight past but couldn’t resist stopping and saying hello.

“Oh. Hello.” Jane glanced up and managed a smile, but she looked tired and there was a redness around her eyes that suggested she’d been recently crying.

“I thought you might have left already,” Eve said.

“It’s my last day at the White Octopus,” Jane replied. “I wish I could stay. I don’t really want to go home.” She paused, then said, “I don’t think I’m very good at it.”

“At what?”

“Being a mother.” She tapped the napkin and Eve saw that she’d been making a list of girl’s names. “Bella” was there, right at the top, beneath the octopus crest.

“Oh.” Eve stared at her. “Well. I’m sure that’s not true.”

Jane smiled slightly. “Sadly, it is. Though I do try. Every day I try. But I get so impatient and cross with Eve and then I feel horrible. It’s impossible to get it right some days. Most days, really. I’ve quite enjoyed having some time away from her. Isn’t that awful?” Tears suddenly filled her eyes and she quickly tried to blink them away. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You must think I’m horrible.”

“I don’t.” Eve pulled out the chair opposite and sat down. “Look, I don’t have children of my own but…well, I can imagine that being a mother must be hard. Really hard sometimes.”

Her eyes flicked to the napkin again, taking in the other names her mum had once considered for her sister. She was surprised to see “Anna” was on the list, right underneath “Bella.” And beneath that, she saw, was a combination of the two. She could read the name even though it had been crossed out—“Annabella.”

“It’s just that I’m so tired,” Jane went on. “All the time. I tried to tell Glen, my husband, about it once and he didn’t say much, but I could tell he was gobsmacked. Just gobsmacked. And a little appalled. I mean, we’ve got this beautiful, healthy, perfect daughter, so what am I complaining about? I know I shouldn’t find it this hard. And Glen didn’t know what to say, and I could tell that what he wanted more than anything was for us to rewind the last five minutes, to go back to pretending that everything was fine. So that’s what we did.” She sighed, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I just thought I would know what to do once I had my own child, but I’m making it up. I’m just making it up as I go along and most of the time it’s not right, and it’s not enough.”

“It sounds really hard,” Eve said. Her eyes went to the list of names again. She desperately wanted to choose the right words to say to her mum, here in this moment, but it was difficult to know what they ought to be. “Do you think it might be possible,” she finally said softly, “that you’re doing better than you think?”

Jane shook her head. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw me.”

Eve longed to tell her mother about all the good memories she had. From before. Life had been so happy when Bella was alive. And not just happy, but warm, and safe, and secure. Before she could speak, though, Jane stood up.

“I should go,” she said, reaching out for the napkin and slipping it into her pocket. “I need to fetch Eve. The hotel have agreed to keep the door to Room 17 open for me so I can fetch my daughter without checking out. I thought I’d bring her here before we go home. To have afternoon tea. It seems like the kind of thing she might like but…” She shrugged and attempted a smile. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes. What Eve will like, I mean. What will work. But all children like cake, don’t they?”

It will work, Eve wanted to say. It will be magical.

“That’s a great idea,” she said. “I think your daughter will love it.”

Jane wiped the remaining tears from her face, said goodbye to Eve, then made her way to the exit. Eve watched her go, and that was when she noticed Max on the other side of the room. He was sitting at a table drinking coffee, but he was looking right at her, and Eve wondered how long he’d been there, watching her interaction with Jane. There was a puzzled expression on his face, but when he saw her looking, he raised his coffee cup in a silent mockery of a toast, and the gesture reminded Eve of the photo she’d seen—the last photo of him before his disappearance.

She felt that magnetic tug towards him once again, and thought of going over, but there didn’t seem anything left to say after last night, so she followed Jane out of the door instead, in search of clocks and octopuses.

—

By the early afternoon, Eve had located five more clocks: one each in the library, the Music Room, the Veranda Restaurant, the ladies’ powder room, and the ballroom. She’d easily scooped up another fourteen octopuses too—mostly from the chandeliers. This seemed like quite a good start, and she was feeling tentatively pleased, but also unnerved by the number of guests she’d seen all over the hotel with scavenger cards in their hands, all clearly engaged in the same activity. She still had six clocks and seventeen octopuses to go.

She also hadn’t managed to track down the Sugar Room, which Alfie had mentioned, and whenever she asked a member of staff where she might find it, she received contradictory directions.

There were pale squares haunting the walls everywhere she looked, marking the places where paintings had once hung, and Eve guessed these were more of Roth’s missing artworks. She could see from the size of the ghostly imprints that they had been large paintings. It simply made no sense that they had vanished. But then, it didn’t make any sense that a human being could vanish either.

As if thinking of Max had summoned him, she walked into the Smoking Room to find him there with a couple of other guests. It was a small cubbyhole of a place, with a pair of dark green leather armchairs positioned in front of a lit fireplace. Hung over this was a painting Eve recognised, from nineteenth-century painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, of an angelic little girl holding a pile of green apples in her hands. The saccharine subject matter seemed an odd choice for the masculine Smoking Room. A larger, faded square on the wallpaper behind showed where a different painting—presumably one of Roth’s—had once hung.

The girl in the painting was older than Bella had been—perhaps three or four—and the apples were green rather than red, but still, Eve shuddered at the sight and didn’t linger on the art or attempt to work out whether it might be an original. Instead, she looked at the floor-to-ceiling humidors and the handsome cigar cabinet that seemed like a restored version of the broken one she’d noticed back in the derelict hotel.

And there was the mirror.

It was strangely difficult to take her eyes from it. Frameless and fan shaped, it was the type of mirror that had been fairly common during the 1930s, and there was nothing especially unusual about it, save for the fact that it was quite tall—tall enough for Eve to see almost the full length of her reflection in the glass. But something was…off. Like a clock that misses the tick to go straight to tock.

There’s a mirror in the Smoking Room. Whatever you do, don’t look into it for too long….

What had the guest at the party said? Something about your reflection coming to life. Eve stared suspiciously into the glass, half hoping and half dreading to see such a thing, but there was nothing unusual about her reflection, save for the fact that she still wasn’t used to seeing herself dressed in this way. There was a pull towards the mirror, though. Maybe it was only because of what the guest had said, but Eve couldn’t help feeling that if she looked at the glass for too long, then she might not be able to look away.

She deliberately turned her head and saw that Max was speaking to a member of staff she didn’t recognise, perhaps asking more questions about the VAD he’d known. The staff member looked uncomfortable and kept glancing at the pocket watch he held in his hand.

“Am I keeping you from a pressing engagement?” Max asked, sounding irritated.

“Not at all, sir,” the man replied, hastily returning the watch to his pocket.

The other two people present were guests reclining in armchairs, enjoying their cigars and chatting. Eve was pleased to see a bronze octopus perched on top of one of the floor-to-ceiling humidors and marked this off on her list. Sixteen to go. And then the telephone began to ring, its shrill tone cutting through the air.

It was a chunky black Bakelite model that looked like it belonged on the desk of a private detective. It sat on a dark wooden table in the corner of the room—the type of telephone table that had a curved seat built into it, so that a person might sit to receive their calls. There was a drawer beneath the telephone for keeping pens and paper too. The telephone, Eve noticed, was not plugged in. The wire trailed down the side of the table leg to where the plug lay upon the parquet floor. And yet, the phone rang and rang, most insistently. Curious, Eve took a step towards it.

“I wouldn’t answer that, if I were you,” one of the guests said. He leaned forwards to stub out his cigar in the ashtray and his companion quickly did the same.

“Why?” Eve looked at the ringing phone. “Who’s calling?”

His muttered response was so quiet that Eve almost didn’t hear it. “The dead.”

Chapter 23

Max—France, 1918

The officers went over the top first, always. Max stood beside the ladder with Thomas, waiting for the moment to go. There was mud everywhere, although most of it had frozen. An icy lump slid down the back of his shirt as he stood against the wall, and he could feel his feet bleeding inside his frozen boots. Last night, his entire greatcoat had frozen, stiff as a board. And time had stopped working again. Whenever he glanced at his trench watch he saw that a whole hour had passed in the space of a minute. Surely, he had been lost in these trenches for years and years.

He worried about his feet. He knew that frozen boots meant gangrene, and gangrene could mean the loss of one or both limbs. Of course, it would be preferable to lose his feet rather than his hands; at least then he could still play the piano. But deep down he knew he would not play the piano again because he wasn’t coming back from the war. It was just a matter of getting through the time that was left.

Beside him, Thomas was humming the Charlie Chaplin Walk as if he hadn’t a care in the world. It was only Max and Thomas left of their little group now. John had had both legs blown off and died a couple of months back. Rupert had been taken out by a sniper. They all missed Betty’s trench cakes. The Germans looked for the officers in particular, prized them above the ordinary soldier.

Suddenly, Thomas abruptly stopped humming. “Four times,” he said.

“What?” Max fumbled in his coat pocket for a cigarette and lit it—not because he especially wanted a smoke in that moment, but because he knew they liked it, the men. There was something about the nonchalant gesture of an officer lighting up that made it seem as if the world was not ending and that he was not afraid.

“That’s how many times I’ve been over the top,” Thomas said, gesturing towards the parapet. “Four times already. This’ll be the last, I think.”

Max suppressed a shudder. Men had these premonitions about their deaths, sometimes, but the truth was that none of them were making it out alive. They didn’t call the officers the Suicide Club for nothing.

“Don’t,” Max said.

It was the last thing he ever said to Thomas because then the order came and their boots were thumping on the rungs of the ladder and they were going over into no-man’s-land, the air buzzing with the sheer, shocking number of bullets flying past.

Max was beside Thomas when his friend was hit in the stomach. This was an injury that Max had seen before, with one of his soldiers—a boy named Charlie Benson. Max had always liked Charlie for his cheerful manner and the way he whistled as he tended to his trench garden. After he was shot in the stomach, Max had watched as the boy scrabbled around on his knees in the mud, desperately trying to push his intestines back inside. For a moment of madness, Max just stood there and watched him do it. Then they’d carried him to the medical tent, which Max knew in hindsight was a damned cruel thing to do because there was nothing that could be done for Charlie, nothing at all. It had taken him hours to slowly die in agony. Max would never forget those anguished groans, still heard them now, at night when he was just falling asleep.

He knew what this meant for Thomas. He knew as soon as it happened. There would be no more dreams of sailing on board a transatlantic liner once the war was over, no more ideas of becoming a professional musician, no more anything, because Thomas was dead. And Max welcomed the idea that he would be next.

Chapter 24

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

The two gentlemen guests who’d been enjoying their cigars rose swiftly to their feet and fled the room, leaving only Max and Eve with the staff member. She stared at the ringing phone, her skin prickling at the thought of the dead trying to get through. What would she hear on the other end if she answered it? Bella’s incoherent baby gabble? The idea was horrible, and she shuddered, suddenly cold. When she looked at Max, he appeared similarly appalled. His mouth was a grim line as he took a step towards it, and Eve had the sense that he didn’t intend to answer the call, but to throw the phone straight out of a window instead. Before he could do so, it abruptly stopped ringing and the room fell quiet once more. Eve walked over and yanked open the drawer of the telephone table, half hoping that it might contain some writing paper, but there was nothing inside but cobwebs.

“You’ve missed one,” Max said. He was looking over her shoulder at the scavenger list still in her hand.

“Where?”

He pointed to the fan-shaped mirror on the other side of the room. “There.”

She looked into the glass and immediately saw the black clock reflected on the wall. It ought to have been hanging directly above her head, but when she glanced around, there was nothing there; it only existed inside the mirror.

“They call it the ghost clock, I believe,” Max said.

Before Eve could reply, another guest burst into the room—a young man in his early twenties, with a pencil-thin moustache and a great deal of styling cream in his hair.

“What does a fellow have to do to get a smoke around here?” he demanded.

“I will happily walk you through the selection in our humidors, sir,” the staff member said politely.

Moments later the guest was sprawled in one of the armchairs, puffing away at a cigar in an agitated fashion. “Take my advice,” he announced, looking at Max and Eve. “Don’t go anywhere near the sixth floor.”

“Why’s that?” Eve asked. She hadn’t been up there yet herself but had heard one of the other guests remark that there was nothing on that floor except staff quarters. Most of the staff lived in, due to the hotel’s remoteness. Still, she meant to check for herself, just in case the elusive Sugar Room was up there.

The guest scowled and took a deep drag on the cigar. “There’s an octopus. A real one, I mean. In the walls. Damn thing almost throttled me with its tentacles. No scavenger hunt is worth a chap’s life.”

Eve looked the guest up and down but could see no sucker marks on his throat, no indication of any ink on his clothes.

“If the lift hadn’t arrived right when it did,” he went on, “well, I shudder to think.”

“And yet you are still gracing us with your presence all the same,” Max remarked. “Not in any hurry to leave after your fearsome encounter?”

The guest looked affronted. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “I may well pack my bags and check out this very night. Why, just the other day my reflection reached out of that mirror and tried to strangle me. No scavenger hunt is worth a chap’s life.”

“You said that already,” Max said.

He was looking intently at the guest. Perhaps, like Eve, he suspected that something wasn’t right. It didn’t seem as if the man’s fear was quite real. Sprawled in his armchair, puffing away on his cigar, the guest didn’t look particularly concerned. And why would he come back to this room at all if his reflection had actually tried to strangle him? When Eve glanced at the mirror, she saw that the guest in the reflection wore a different expression altogether; he was smirking. She suspected he was just trying to keep fellow competitors away from the sixth floor, probably to put them off the scent of whatever clocks and octopuses were up there.

She decided she would visit the sixth floor next, but just then the clock in the mirror chimed the hour for three o’clock and Eve realised she was late for her afternoon tea with Mrs. Roth.

Chapter 25

The veranda was busy when Eve arrived. Rattan armchairs were set at round tables covered in pristine white cloths. Waiters and waitresses bustled between them, delivering pots of tea and art deco cake stands, with loops of pearls and crystals hung gracefully from every tier. The mountains looked like a painting in the distance and the lake was coloured blue as a sapphire by the sky above. It was impossible not to relish the purity of the air.

Eve scanned the veranda and quickly spotted Mrs. Roth waiting at a table set for two at the end of the terrace. As she walked over, she passed another table occupied by Jane and a little girl with blue ribbons in her hair. She was about three years old and wore a lacy ivory dress. Eve stared. It was her younger self, reaching for a peppermint cream, biting into it, and letting out a giggle of pure delight.

Eve returned Jane’s wave before continuing to the other table. The free chair was positioned so that it looked back the way she had come, giving her a good view of Jane and the back of little Eve’s head. She tried to keep her attention fixed on her companion as she pulled the chair out and sat down. The table was set with a lavender-grey tea set, identical to the one Eve owned except for the fact that it was in pristine condition.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I became a bit caught up in the scavenger hunt.”

“Never mind,” Mrs. Roth replied. “You’re here now.”

She was wearing a long-sleeved dress in mulberry purple with a lace jabot and matching gloves. She looked frail and a little hunched, shifting about where she sat. Eve briefly wondered whether she should offer to fetch her some extra cushions or a blanket or something. How did this woman fit into the Roth family tree? Could she possibly have been Nikolas Roth’s wife? She seemed about the right age, but hadn’t Anna said they’d lost both their parents recently? When she asked, the old woman said, “It’s a little hard to keep track of the Roths sometimes, I imagine. There’s rather a lot of us, these days.”

“But you did know Nikolas Roth?” Eve pressed.

The old woman nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “I knew him.”

“He’s a bit of an enigma in my time period,” Eve said. “Because he was so possessive and secretive about his art, I mean.”

Eve looked at Mrs. Roth expectantly, but she only gazed back.

“Do you know why he was like that?” Eve asked directly. “Why he refused to sell his paintings or even exhibit them outside the hotel?”

Mrs. Roth remained silent once again, and for a moment, Eve wondered whether she had even heard her. Perhaps she wasn’t all there, mentally. She was extremely old, after all. But then she said in a quiet, thin voice, “Yes. I know why Nikolas was protective of his paintings. It was because of the secret.”

“Secret?” Eve’s interest was piqued by the word and she leaned forwards slightly. “What secret?”

Mrs. Roth shook her head. “It isn’t mine to tell. I promised I would never breathe it to any living soul.” She cleared her throat and went on in a stronger voice. “Anyway, I don’t wish to talk about Nikolas Roth. We should discuss his children instead. I understand you’ve already met Harry, the oldest of the three. And his sister, Anna—she’s the youngest. How about Tristan?”

“Tristan?”

“The middle brother. He’s the resident librarian. And he takes care of the clocks.”

“I don’t think I’ve met him,” Eve replied, confused by the line of conversation. It occurred to her that Tristan might be a useful person to seek out, though. If he wound the clocks, then he’d know where they all were. “Why did Nikolas Roth leave the hotel to Anna if she’s the youngest?” she asked. “And a woman too.”

“Who can say?” Mrs. Roth rapidly blinked her watery eyes. “But I imagine he thought that Anna understands the hotel the best. Ah, I see Nan can’t resist making a monkey of herself, as usual.”

Eve twisted in her chair to see the little girl peering through the ironwork at them. The next second, she’d vanished with a giggle.

“She’ll get a spanking if Anna catches her,” Mrs. Roth remarked, but her tone was an indulgent one.

The next moment, Nan popped up again a little further down the railings, peering up at Jane and giving her an enthusiastic wave. Jane smiled at her and waved back. Then Nan leaned up to three-year-old Eve and whispered something that made her giggle. Nan’s hand shot through the bars and deposited something on Eve’s lap. Adult Eve couldn’t make out what it was—perhaps a peppermint cream pinched from one of the other tables. The next second, Nan had scampered away.

“Good afternoon, ladies. May I serve tea?”

A smiling waitress appeared beside them, a silver tray in her hands. She was in her early thirties and had the same auburn hair as Nan.

“Thank you, Liesl,” Mrs. Roth replied.

She poured them each a cup, then placed the teapot in the middle of the table and said she’d shortly be back with their food.

Mrs. Roth nodded after her and said, “Liesl’s another one of the family. Tristan’s wife. A nice girl. Do try the tea.”

Eve looked down and was surprised to see the liquid was an inky black colour.

“The hotel’s own blend,” Mrs. Roth told her. She raised the cup with slightly shaking hands to take a sip. “So, have you been enjoying your stay? And the hunt, of course?”

“Very much. The hotel is remarkable.”

“Yes, the White Octopus is a very special place. It’s not for everyone, but I’ve always been happy here. Happier than I would once have thought possible.”

“Have you lived here a long time?”

“About forty-five years now.”

“You must know so much about the place,” Eve prompted. She didn’t have time to take tea with old women unless doing so unearthed useful information for the scavenger hunt.

“I expect I know one or two of its secrets by now,” Mrs. Roth agreed.

“Including where to find a sheet of writing paper?”

“It’s almost all gone, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Roth reached for her teacup again. Her hands really were trembling quite badly, and Eve tried not to wince at the thought that she might spill the scalding-hot tea all down herself. “You’re not the only guest with something in their past they wish to change,” the old woman went on. “Anna has the last sheet locked away in a drawer.”

“So it could be the prize? For the scavenger hunt?”

Mrs. Roth regarded her for a moment. “It could,” she agreed. “If that’s what you truly want. My advice would be to seek a different treasure, however.”

“Why’s that?”

“What’s done is done. No one should live in the past.”

Liesl returned just then to set their cake plate on the table. Between the loops of pearls and crystals were the most extraordinary sugar sculptures. There were octopuses like the one Eve had received upon arrival, but there were also shoals of fish, delicate fronds of seaweed, turtles with lacelike shells, and sparkling white jellyfish.

“Here we have smoked salmon sandwiches,” Liesl said, indicating the bottom tier. “And on the other two we have a selection of pastries and some of Mila’s sugar creatures.”

“They’re almost too beautiful to eat,” Eve said once Liesl had gone.

Beyond Mrs. Roth’s shoulder, she could see her younger self showed no such concerns and was eagerly piling the sugar animals onto her plate.

“Mila is very talented,” Mrs. Roth said. “She’s the hotel’s sugar artist, you know.”

Eve remembered Alfie telling her that his mother was the sugar artist, back when she’d first arrived in Room 27. He’d also said that his father was a mixologist, so she guessed that meant Mila must be married to Harry.

“But enough about our family,” Mrs. Roth said. “Tell me about yourself and where you’re from.”

Eve gave a brief account. Already, she was starting to wish she hadn’t agreed to this. Mrs. Roth had told her nothing about the hotel she didn’t already know, and time was wasting.

“And how did you first hear of the White Octopus?” Mrs. Roth asked, selecting a lemon tart topped with a sugar seal.

Eve’s eyes slid towards Jane, who was now wearing a nervous expression as she watched her daughter munch through the final cake.

“My mother brought me.” Eve looked back at Mrs. Roth. “When I was small.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Roth dabbed at her watery eyes with her napkin, then folded it neatly upon the table. “And are you close, the two of you?”

Eve shook her head. “Not really. I…ruined her life, I think. That’s why I need the writing paper. To put it right.”

At the other table, she was aware that little Eve was getting progressively more upset about something. Jane was trying to shush her, but this only made things worse until the girl finally erupted into a shout that echoed around the restaurant. “I WANT CAKE!”

“Don’t shout!” Jane hissed, looking mortified as a sudden quiet fell around the room. “There is no more cake, you’ve eaten it all! Now it’s time to go home, back to Daddy.”

“No!” the girl wailed. Jane had risen to her feet, but her daughter was gripping the table like her life depended on it. “I don’t want to go! Five more minutes!”

“Eve, please!” Jane grabbed her hand and pulled her down from the chair. “Just once can’t we leave somewhere without tears and tantrums?”

There was an edge of pure exhaustion in her voice, and at the next table, adult Eve felt a horrible flush of guilt. She stared at her younger self, willing her to do as Jane asked and leave nicely, but instead the girl snatched a teacup from the table and hurled it to the floor, where it smashed into dozens of pieces. For a moment, Jane looked as if she might slap Eve, but then her face crumpled, and she was blinking back tears instead.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Liesl, who had hurried over to help tidy up. “I’ll pay for it.”

“Please don’t worry, miss,” Liesl replied. “It’s only a teacup.”

Realising that she’d made a mistake, little Eve started to cry then too—noisy sobs that echoed around the veranda, causing guests to look either annoyed or sympathetic. Eve just felt furious.

“What a brat,” she muttered beneath her breath.

Mrs. Roth arched an eyebrow and shook her head. “I see you don’t have children of your own,” she said sadly. “She’s not a brat. She’s just three.”

“Come on,” Jane said, grabbing Eve’s hand. “We’re leaving.”

She tried to tug her forwards, but Eve yanked herself away so abruptly that she fell over. There were proper howls then and Jane had to bend awkwardly around her huge baby bump to haul her back up. Tears ran down her face as she carried her daughter, still screaming, out of the room. Suddenly Eve heard Jane’s words from before.

I’m just making it up as I go along and most of the time it’s not right, it’s not enough…

And Eve wanted to tell her that the problem wasn’t with Jane, it was with Eve. Bella would probably have been a better daughter. She wouldn’t have broken teacups and screamed. She would have smiled and been quiet and good. Eve wondered then whether perhaps there had always been something wrong with her, right from the start. She turned back to Mrs. Roth. “I was in the Smoking Room earlier and a guest burst in and told everyone there was a massive octopus hiding in the walls that tried to throttle him on the sixth floor.”

“Indeed?”

“Well, what do you make of that?”

“What am I supposed to make of it? Stranger things have happened at the White Octopus, I daresay. Then again, guests have been known to overindulge in martinis in the Palm Bar during the middle of the day too. Which do you think is more likely?”

“I need that writing paper,” Eve said. “Not just for me, but for everyone else who was affected by what I did too.” She forced out the words: “My little sister died. And it was my fault.”

There it was again—that savage rush of shame, so intense that it almost flayed the skin from her bones, yet some twisted part of Eve relished the agony.

“Well,” Mrs. Roth said quietly, “I am truly sorry to hear that. But you don’t get to be as old as I am without living through a tragedy or two, and in doing so you learn that sometimes terrible things happen and it’s simply no one’s fault at all.”

Eve had a bitter taste in her mouth and pushed her plate away. Mrs. Roth didn’t know anything about this particular tragedy. She had no right to comment upon it.

“My own daughter died recently,” the old woman added. She suddenly looked even smaller and frailer in her chair, the lines on her face more deeply etched. Her watery eyes blinked and her hands trembled.

“I’m sorry,” Eve said dutifully, although in truth it was hard to care about other people’s suffering when she was so consumed by her own.

The older woman gazed into the dregs of her teacup. “You know, it’s only after someone dies that we think of all the things we should have said to them. I’ve had a few months to reflect on this and if I could see my daughter one last time, I would be honoured to tell her that she was the single greatest joy of my life. I don’t think I ever told her that, not in so many words. Hopefully she felt it anyway and knew it to be true deep down. But, still. Some things ought to be said.”

Eve felt a sudden ache of loss as she thought of her own mother. They barely spoke or saw each other now. They simply didn’t know each other at all. Before she could reply, a soft, warm creature brushed against her foot, and she winced as a rabbit hopped out from beneath their table. She watched as it bounced its way across the veranda and right up to Anna, who’d appeared in the doorway. She quickly bent to scoop it up and then disappeared inside, but not before Eve noticed that there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s almost time to go in, I think,” Mrs. Roth said, glancing up at the terrace clock.

“Would you mind answering one last question for me first?” Eve asked. “I haven’t been able to find the Sugar Room anywhere. Could you tell me where it is?”

If she could do that, then at least the last hour wouldn’t have been entirely wasted.

“No,” the older woman said instantly. “It would do no good even if I tried to give you directions. The Sugar Room only appears at certain times for certain reasons to certain people. Some say it only appears for soulmates.”

Eve pulled a face. “Soulmates?”

Mrs. Roth smiled slightly. “You don’t believe in such a thing?”

“Of course not.”

“I never found love like that myself,” Mrs. Roth replied. “But…well, have you ever witnessed a bond so strong that it creates ripples?”

“I’m not sure what that even means.”

“Perhaps ‘ripples’ isn’t the right word, but I don’t know what else to call them. Whatever they are, they don’t stay put as they should. They move, you see, up and down the years, as if time itself means nothing at all.” Mrs. Roth rubbed her eyes. “I’m feeling very tired. I’m always so tired, these days. It’s been a great pleasure to have tea with you, Eve. I have looked forward to it so much.” Her voice was tremoring again. She cleared her throat. “But all pleasures must come to an end.”

Eve rose to her feet to say goodbye, glad that the tea was finally over. The guests all around continued to talk and chatter. There was the chink of teacups being placed upon saucers and the scrape of forks scooping up final crumbs. Some of the guests were descending the stairs in their fur coats to head towards the sunbathing lawns and the lake. But as Eve watched Mrs. Roth hobble slowly across the veranda towards the hotel, she noticed that there were people inside too, stood motionlessly up against the windows.

Anna was there, and Harry. She spotted Alfie and Luca, and Liesl with her arms wrapped around Nan and the two other boys who must have been her brothers. They were all lined up at the dark windows, as if watching a show, and perhaps something of a tragic one at that, because the Roths all wore grave, sombre expressions. When they noticed Eve looking, they melted away from the glass, like ghosts, going back to whatever business normally kept them busy inside and leaving Eve with a tingling chill she was unable to shake off.

Chapter 26

When Eve returned to the lobby, she immediately saw her three-year-old self standing next to Jane by the reception desk. The place was quiet at this time of day, so Eve heard the child suddenly whimper, “Mama? Hug?”

“In a minute.”

She tugged at her mother’s hand. “Hug, please?”

Jane was trying to listen to something the receptionist was saying and shook her off. “For God’s sake, Eve, would you just wait?”

Across the room, adult Eve winced, expecting her younger self to start shouting and tantruming again, but instead the girl turned away and walked across the foyer, her blue buckled shoes scuffing and squeaking over the floor. When she got to the fountain, she tried to peer up into the lowest basin, but it was too tall even when she was on tiptoe. So she sat down on the floor beside it, instead, her legs sticking straight out in front of her. The girl looked small and sad, but Eve couldn’t find it in her to feel pity.

You’ll ruin it all…

There was the tread of feet as someone else entered the lobby and Eve saw it was Max. He looked as if he was heading straight to the piano but as he passed the child by the fountain he paused. To Eve’s disgust, the girl was still whimpering and snivelling, and she felt ashamed that he should see her like that, even if he didn’t realise who she was.

“Pardon me, miss,” Max said, looking down at her. “Have you seen a rabbit around here?”

Adult Eve felt that familiar recoil at the word “rabbit.” Was there to be no end to the wretched monsters? But small Eve just shook her head.

“Sometimes I find the rascal hiding in my hat.” Max swept off his fedora and reached inside. Small Eve watched with big eyes as he pulled out a handful of pennies, which he dropped in the girl’s lap with a sigh. “Leaving his pocket money lying about the place again. What a naughty rabbit.”

“Naughty rabbit!” small Eve exclaimed with a giggle.

Max knelt by her side, rummaged inside the fedora again, and this time brought out a small sugar octopus. “Now, how did this fellow get in there?” he demanded. “And what has he done with my rabbit?”

He offered the sugar octopus to the girl and adult Eve suddenly remembered the magic of this moment—of meeting a real magician by the fountain of this hotel and marvelling at the sparkle of white sugar tentacles. The little girl leaned closer to Max then, put her hand on his shoulder, and spoke in a whisper.

“Is it real magic?”

“Well,” Max whispered back. “That depends. There are many different types of magic.”

Jane walked over to join them. “What do you say, Eve?” she asked, nodding towards the sugar octopus. A small smile softened her mother’s face and Eve felt grateful to Max for that, at least.

“Thank you,” small Eve replied.

“Anytime.” Max stood up and put his hat on his head. “The pennies are good for wishes.” He nodded towards the fountain, then wandered over to the piano in the corner, sat down, and began to play one of his own compositions—another piece that Eve knew well. It was, in fact, the first music of his that she’d ever heard after seeking him out at the end of that group therapy session so many years ago. She’d loved it then, as she did now, but had had no idea that she’d heard it once before, as a child. She wanted to leave but couldn’t tear herself away as Jane scooped Eve up and sat her on the edge of the fountain. She helped the little girl to toss the pennies into the water, one by one. They watched them sink to the bottom and when Eve tried to pass a penny over, Jane shook her head and gave it back.

“My wishes are all for you, my love.”

“This fountain isn’t for wishing.” Anna had entered the room and stopped beside them. She wore the same belted mint dress as earlier, and her glossy, dark hair was still tied up in a chignon bun, but something was off, something was different. Her eyes were red from crying. She was smiling at Jane, but it wasn’t a happy expression. It was heartbreak and it was loss.

“No?” Jane asked.

“No,” Anna said softly. “It’s a fountain for unwishing.”

“What’s that?” small Eve asked.

“We wish for the wrong thing sometimes,” Anna replied. “And an unwishing fountain is where we can…take it back.”

“How strange,” Jane said.

“Do you think so?” Anna looked at the water and the marble tentacles sprawling up the basins. “I’ve always thought that an unwish is perhaps the only thing more precious than a wish.” She looked back to Jane. “The receptionist tells me you’re checking out now, Mrs. Shaw?”

“That’s right.”

“I hope you enjoyed your stay at the White Octopus.”

“It was wonderful, thank you.” Jane smiled. “I only wish I could remember it. Once we’re home, I mean.”

Anna nodded. She stepped forwards, and Eve assumed she was going to shake Jane’s hand, but she threw her arms around the other woman instead, hugging her tightly over her bump. Eve saw the startled expression on Jane’s face as she patted Anna on the back. She saw how tightly Anna held on to her before letting her go. Why was she looking at Jane like that? Like she didn’t want her to ever leave?

“Have a safe journey,” she said, before walking out of the room.

Still looking confused, Jane turned back to small Eve, wrapping her arms around her and holding her close for a moment before kissing her on the head. “Come on, then. Time to go home.”

“Would the little one like to help me wind the clock before you go?”

For the first time, Eve realised there was another person in the lobby, just out of her sight. When she stepped further into the room, she saw a wiry man in his midthirties, tinkering with the grandfather clock. The name badge on his jacket read Tristan: Nikolas Roth’s second son. He smiled gently at Jane and Eve. “My children used to love helping with this old clock. Nan still does.”

“All right,” Jane agreed. “Thank you. But then we really have to go, Eve.”

I should go too, Eve thought, yet she knew that she wouldn’t. Not until her mother was out of sight. These were her last moments of seeing her this way and she wasn’t about to give them up. Her younger self skipped eagerly over to the clock and Tristan guided her hands to one of the chains inside.

“Just think how long this clock has been here,” he said. “Ticking and tocking its way through all the years. That’s it, pull the chain just like that, all the way to the top. Do you hear it? Tick—”

Tock.

The last few minutes unravelled back on themselves and Eve was suddenly in her original place in the doorway watching her younger self, who was no longer winding the clock but sat next to the fountain instead. And then Max, who was no longer playing the piano, was stopping beside her, pulling pennies and a sugar octopus from his hat. Then there was Anna hugging Jane like she would never let her go. It all played out exactly as it had before, five minutes of rewound time.

Tick.

It felt to Eve as if she was an observer inside her own head. She saw things from a slightly different perspective than she had the first time but didn’t seem to be able to do anything different. The same moments were simply replaying themselves again.

Tock.

There were Jane and Eve tossing coins into the fountain as Max played the piano.

Tick.

And there was Tristan.

“Would the little one like to help me wind the clock…?”

Tock.

And then there they all were, back to the moment they had left before, when small Eve had just wound the clock. Only time didn’t slip backwards again, but continued forwards instead. In the corner of the room, Max’s fingers fumbled into a discordant chord, and he abruptly stopped playing. Silence descended.

“It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?” Tristan said. “It only happens once a week, when the clock is wound. A funny glitch of its mechanisms, I suppose, that makes time rewind for five minutes.”

“Incredible,” Jane breathed, looking stunned.

“That’s some trick,” Max said from the piano.

“It’s no trick, Mr. Everly,” Tristan replied. “Everything you see at the White Octopus Hotel is real.”

“Time for us to go, Eve,” Jane said. “Say goodbye.”

“Bye-bye,” the little girl said, raising her hand in a wave before Jane led her across the foyer to the lift. Unlike ordinary guests, they wouldn’t be leaving through the front doors. Eve watched them go and then glanced across the room and her eyes locked with Max’s. He looked from her to the grandfather clock and back again, a deep frown etched upon his face. Then he stood up and walked over to Tristan, who was just closing the cabinet on the clock.

“How was that done?” he demanded. “No illusionist can rewind time.”

Tristan gave a small half smile. “But, Mr. Everly,” he said, “we don’t really have the faintest notion of what time actually is. How can we possibly? Yet we claim to measure it and count it and so on, but the truth is that time will always be as much of a mystery to us as death itself.”

Chapter 27

Max—June 1918

It had been a long, tiresome journey, but Max thought he had weathered it well. He had mastered the art of keeping himself together over the last couple of years. He hadn’t allowed himself to become emotional during the train journey into the mountains—not even when writing a letter home to his mother to say that he was one of the lucky ones who was being transferred from a German camp to be interned in Switzerland. Thoughts of home were always dangerous—something that could unravel you. He wrote to his aunt too, although she’d stopped writing back after her two sons had both been killed. Max wrote anyway, in the hopes that the letters might bring her some small comfort. And perhaps, one day, when she was more herself, she might write to him again too.

I’m doing really rather well, he thought. His chest ached, obviously, thanks to that little piece of shrapnel that had buried itself into his body. It had become infected in the German camp and the throbbing ache of it kept him up at night, made it hard to breathe sometimes. But, after all, the trenches had been the hard part. The German POW camp had been a different type of hell. Sitting in safety on a train that was taking him to a place of rest in Switzerland was easy. Anyone could do that. You didn’t get to complain about that, not when so many of your comrades were still back there on the battlefield, never to return.

I’m very glad to be leaving Germany.

I have been unwell but hope to be fully recovered soon.

All my love…

His hand barely shook as he signed his name.

Your loving son, Max.

As he slipped the letter into the envelope, it was impossible not to think of all those hundreds of letters written by his men that he had had to read and censor—part of his duties as a junior officer in the trenches.

Dearest Mother…

Please send my love to Bertie….

I was always proud to be your son….

A candle made all the difference….

Time is topsy-turvy here….

There was no band at Waterloo, not like they had for Sammy….

Charlie was forever mentioning that lack of a band in his letters home. I wasn’t surprised or the least upset, he’d always write. Yet the absence of a band—let alone the cheering crowds that had been there when his older brother, Sammy, left for war a year earlier—was something that came up in his letters again and again. Max could still see the hyacinths and peonies of Charlie’s trench garden, growing out of their German howitzer shells. He recalled how the boy had written to his mother, asking her to send packets of nasturtium seeds.

And don’t worry, he’d assured her. I made sure to leave plenty of flowers in the village in case anyone ever comes back, after the war is over. It has to end sometime. It can’t go on forever.

Charlie had turned a petrol tin into a watering can by punching holes in the side and would whistle as he watered the plants. He was an expert whistler. And Max liked hearing favourite tunes like “Auld Lang Syne” again. Music was perhaps the thing he missed the most from his old life. It hadn’t been so bad when Thomas was there with his gramophone and the sound of ragtime records had floated from their dugout, through the trenches, and out over no-man’s-land.

Max’s days at the Royal College of Music felt more like a dream than reality now. He could not imagine himself going back to it. In fact, he couldn’t really imagine going back to his old life at all. He wondered if his mother would be there to greet him when he finally arrived home—whether she would even recognise him, or walk right past him on the platform, searching for some other man, one who no longer existed.

“We’re here!” someone cried.

Max looked up and saw a small station up ahead. With a jolt, he realised it was crowded with people and he quickly struggled to his feet, dreading the reception that lay ahead. When the POWs had arrived by train into a German town en route to the camp, the platform had been full of furious citizens who hated them. Just hated them with all their might. There had been yelling and screaming, palpable bitterness ripping through the air. Some of the civilians had thrown stale, mouldy bread at them too. Max had been so hungry that he had snatched the mildewed pieces up from the ground and eaten them. He was glad of the bread, but a few people had brought bricks to throw as well.

Switzerland was neutral, though. Max hadn’t expected a similar situation here. Yet the platform ahead was so crowded with people that he feared something must be wrong. Perhaps the Swiss didn’t want them either. Perhaps they were going to be boarded and sent back to the camp in Germany. Then he heard the singing. There were children on the platform, an entire choir. And the adults weren’t shouting, they were cheering. Some were even waving flags. There were so many flowers, everywhere he looked. And the children’s voices raised in song was the loveliest sound Max had heard in the last year.

The train doors opened, and the civilians came forwards to press gifts of chocolate and cigarettes and oranges into their hands. As Max stepped down onto the platform, he thought of Charlie and how miffed he had been about the lack of a band to see them off at Waterloo. He wished Charlie could see the children singing for them now, but Charlie was back in France, lying alone in the mud with a bullet through his guts.

Please send packets of nasturtium seeds as soon as you can….

Max recalled how he had stood with the packets of requested seeds in his hands, looking down at the trench garden that would now go untended.

You would be proud, Mother, my peonies are topping….

Charlie had died the day before the seeds arrived. As he stared down at the garden, Max still had some of Charlie’s blood on his boots. And there were hundreds of Charlies he’d left back there, thousands of them.

It will be your duty to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire….

Lord Kitchener’s words to the troops rang around Max’s head. Yet there was no longer anyone from his company to set that example for. They were gone, all gone.

It had seemed possible to bear it in the trenches because there was no alternative, but here, now, surrounded by all these normal people who were still a part of the normal world, it was suddenly impossible, intolerable, insane.

The children sang and Max felt something inside him break.

There was a young man about his own age on the platform beside him, dressed in a hotel uniform with a name badge that read Harry. He was smiling as he asked Max for his luggage ticket, looking at him with a fascinated, wondrous sort of expression, as though Max were a rare bird he’d never spotted before, never thought to see at all in the wild. Max didn’t know where the ticket was, couldn’t remember what he’d done with it, and nor did he care. For a moment he thought he saw Charlie in the crowd, grinning widely.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

There was something wrong with his legs; they wouldn’t hold him up. He crumpled to the floor in the middle of the platform, and everything unravelled; he was sobbing. Even now, part of him—the part that could still forget—was shouting, My men mustn’t see me like this! But the men were gone, and it didn’t matter now if he cried. Nothing much mattered anymore. The tears burned, along with the shame, and Max wished he were back there with the rest of them, back where he should have been. For a moment it felt like he was there, lost and dying alone in the dirt.

Then there was a woman crouched on the ground beside him. She wore a nurse’s starched white uniform, and reached for his hand and squeezed it in her own. Max wondered how long it had been since someone had held his hand. He didn’t think he’d ever been so glad to feel the touch of another person or so grateful for the fact that she didn’t say a word. She just quietly sat beside him, her fingers wrapped tightly around his.

Chapter 28

It was confusing, at first, to see a nurse in the trenches. Max would notice her walking past his dugout sometimes, lit up by the flash of shells. Or she’d be there handing out pretzels in the mess, which made no sense because they had no bakery at the front, yet sometimes Max could smell the bread baking. The nurse wasn’t covered in mud like the rest of them. Her uniform was blue and white and pristine. And that made no sense either. She looked a bit like the VAD from Thomas’s cigarette card, even had the same chin-length black hair. It was as if the miniature painting had come to life.

Once, while he was on watch, he spotted her in no-man’s-land, crouched by the side of a fallen soldier. She was just right there, out in the open, where any stray bullet could take off a piece of her head. He shouted out a warning and she looked up, straight at him. He noticed then that her eyes were different colours—one was blue and the other was green. His mother would have said that one of them must be a ghost eye or a witch eye, meaning the woman could see into the afterlife, converse with ghosts, glimpse things other people could not.

He blinked and the nurse vanished. Had he imagined her? Was this how he knew he was losing his mind? What other explanation could there be? Max didn’t believe in ghosts. Or angels. Or cigarette card paintings that came to life. But the more he saw the nurse, the more the trenches were the thing that started to seem unreal. Sometimes they would fade away altogether and he’d be somewhere else entirely—somewhere clean, and warm, and safe. The first time the trenches vanished, Max truly thought he must be dead. But the nurse was still there—the one with the black hair and the different-coloured eyes.

“Are you real?” he finally asked her one day.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is your name really Eve Shaw? That’s what I’ve heard them calling you.”

She nodded.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Even now, he didn’t entirely trust that she was a real person. It seemed far more likely that he had invented her. “But are you…can you be the same person who sent those parcels to me out at the front? It was you, wasn’t it? I’m glad I get to thank you in person. The records you sent. They meant a lot to my friend. Thomas.”

Suddenly, Thomas was there, standing outside on the balcony and looking through the window at him with half his head blown away. Max’s hands began twitching and then that fog came down and the hotel vanished and all around was mud and barbed wire. It took him the rest of the day to find his way back to the White Octopus. He fought hard to do it, wandering trench after trench, pushing his way through piles of bones and the buzzing of flies.

It was a path he had to travel over and over again in the days and weeks that followed—one that shifted and twisted like a maze, always trying to trick him into going the wrong way. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he would stumble across Charlie’s trench garden and stop to rest amongst the flowers for a while. A sign propped up against the trench wall read: Come into the Garden and Forget the War. Which was odd because Max remembered that sign being in the conservatory of a nearby hotel where they’d been billeted, but otherwise it was all just as it had been, and there was Charlie, watering his flowers with his petrol can, whistling “Auld Lang Syne.”

One day, another soldier, Jeffries, even came out, just like he had before, and Charlie stopped what he was doing and tried to point out all the work he’d done, so proud and pleased, but Jeffries only sneered a little and said, “Well, Benson, you know it’s all a waste of time, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

“We head north tomorrow.”

He didn’t wait for a reply, but left Charlie looking around his garden. There were tears glimmering in his eyes, and he furiously tried to blink them away as he threw the tin watering can into the mud.

And Max said, “It isn’t a waste.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

There was a cigarette in his hand, just like there had been before, and he took a drag as he nodded at the garden. “The next fellow will get the benefit.”

Charlie paused for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Max wondered how many times he’d had this same conversation with Charlie, how many times he’d gone around this same loop, and how many more circuits he still had to do before he found his way out. Part of him believed he would be lost in the trenches forever.

But then, somehow, Eve started to find him there and would lead him back to the hotel. She always seemed to know the way and sometimes, like tonight, the light of her candle shone straight through the trenches, revealing them for the shadows that they were and not reality at all. He could see a dark room beyond, with other men sleeping in their beds, and the icy glitter of stars on the other side of the windows.

“You’re at the hotel,” Eve was saying. “The White Octopus. You’re safe.”

Max looked down and saw she was holding his hand. And there was an octopus there as well, a tattoo, only tattoos didn’t move and this octopus was drifting and its tentacles were unfurling until they wrapped around Max’s hand too and he noticed that one of them had a black tip. He looked up at Eve, trying to work out if she could see it.

“What’s that?” he whispered, flicking his eyes back down to their entwined hands.

“That? Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s just my octopus.”

Max stared. It was hard to tell where the octopus ended and Eve began. It was like they were one and the same.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

Eve smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her do so, and suddenly Max felt a glow, a feeling of having achieved something extraordinary. It made him want to keep hold of her hand and never let it go, but he knew he would have to return to the front eventually. There was still a war to be won. Or lost. It hardly mattered at this point; they’d all lost. But in the meantime, he enjoyed the peace and the quiet of the hotel. He relished the pure air. Sometimes the nurses piled a load of blankets on top of him and sat him out on the balcony to bask in the silence of the mountains and soak up the warmth of the sun. It was good to feel clean again. It was good to sleep in a bed. It was good to lay down the burdens of command, just temporarily. To not have to make decisions that led to whether men lived or died. To not watch friends perish in the mud.

The POWs were all supposed to be sitting out the war in Switzerland. That was the agreement that Britain had entered into with Germany, but it wasn’t what Max had agreed to. His chest still ached from the piece of shrapnel that had gone into his lung, but the infection was clearing up now. Soon he would recover and then he would make his escape—back to the front. He realised they’d sent the POWs to remote mountain resorts in order to make escape more difficult, but he would find a way somehow. As soon as he was better and the snow had melted in the spring. In the meantime, perhaps it was all right to have a rest.

Max didn’t normally chat much with the other officers sharing the large room with him. This morning, though, a couple of them were prattling on again about an armistice and Max couldn’t prevent a scornful snort. The other two men glanced over. “What?” one asked. “You don’t think it will happen?”

Max shook his head. “They’ve spoken of armistice before. It came to nothing then and it’ll come to nothing now.”

He found it impossible to imagine there ever being peace again after all this. Normal was gone for good, for all of them. But then one of the nurses switched on the radio and they heard it. An armistice had been declared. And the war was over. There would be no escape, no return to the front. They could hear cheers of jubilation over the airwaves, yet the room inside the White Octopus was strangely silent. None of the soldiers cheered. Most barely smiled. Max had thought he’d feel relief and joy if and when the war finally came to an end, but it was too late for that. How could he feel joy when so many of his friends had lost their lives? And how could he possibly feel relief when he’d seen for himself how quickly and devastatingly life could unravel? If it had happened once, it could happen again. What was he even supposed to do with himself if he couldn’t return to the front? The thought of going home and trying to pick up where he’d left off was unthinkable. As the next few hours passed by, it started to sink in for Max that he quite simply had nowhere to go.

“Do you need anything?”

He looked up to see Eve at the foot of his bed, watching him with her steady, calm gaze. Max found himself blurting the words before he had a chance to reconsider. “I need for the war to not be over.”

“Why would you say something like that?” Eve asked.

“Because I’m not finished. I need to make amends.”

“How?”

Max searched his mind for the answer but came up empty and the silence stretched on between them. The fact was that he would never be able to kill enough Germans or save enough British soldiers. There was no making amends—not now, or ever. It didn’t matter whether the war ended or not. It was hopeless. And now he could feel himself dissolving once again, into that flock of frenzied black birds, the carrion crows that had been all over no-man’s-land. What was the point? What was the point of any of it now? There was nothing good left. He didn’t want to be here at the hotel, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else either.

“Maybe there are some things that we can’t make amends for,” Eve said, somewhere through the storm of wings. “Maybe we can only make peace with the past.”

Max said nothing. How could he ever make peace with the things he’d seen and the people he’d lost? The things he’d done?

“You’ve done everything that was asked of you,” Eve said, but he couldn’t see her at all now, through all those birds that had once been pieces of his soul. “It’s over. You deserve to return to a normal life.”

“People don’t often get what they deserve in life, old boy,” said a voice at his elbow. “You know that.”

Max gritted his teeth. He recognised that voice and knew if he looked up, he would see Thomas standing there beside his bed, but Thomas was dead, dead, dead. Max screwed his eyes up tight. And when he opened them and looked around, he was alone.

Chapter 29

After the armistice was announced, there were dark days when he couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t summon the will to speak to anyone—not even Eve. For days and days, he uttered no words at all. Then one morning, Eve brought a gramophone onto the ward, along with a selection of ragtime records. Many of Thomas’s favourite songs were there, and hearing the music his friend had loved so much filling the air around him was a torment to begin with. A couple of times, Max saw him standing beside the gramophone, rifling through the box of records.

“ ‘Frog Legs Rag’ next, I think…”

And then Thomas was sitting on the edge of the bed, the record on his lap, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers.

“So?” Thomas prompted. “What do you think?”

“About what?” Max asked. His thoughts were sluggish and as sticky as the mud in the trenches all around him. A rat scuttled over his pillow, and he felt the flick of its tail as he batted it away.

“Keep up, Everly.” Thomas rolled his eyes. “The dinner? For John? Might help cheer him up a bit. There’s still no word about Herbert, you know.”

“Oh, that.”

The tortoise had escaped or something. That’s what the letter from his mother had said. God knew why she’d thought to share this news with him in the first place. Max swore that John fretted more over that tortoise than some of the other men did about their sweethearts and children.

“Can you organise something?” Thomas prompted.

“I’ll get William onto it,” Max replied.

“Good man. Here, take this.”

Thomas held out the ragtime record. Max went to take it, but when he raised his hand, there was suddenly a pistol in it, aiming right at Thomas’s head. Before he could stop himself, he’d pulled the trigger. There was the BANG and the echo and the slimy warmth of blood splattering over his skin in a dark, sticky rain.

He jerked upright in bed, an anguished sound escaping from his lips. For long moments, he was completely unable to work out where he was or what was happening. He was still there, lost in the trenches, but then he felt Eve’s hand holding tightly on to his and it all came back—the White Octopus Hotel and his fellow occupants on the ward, who were trying to pretend they hadn’t been woken up by another one of his episodes. And even though the dream was over, and he was now awake, he couldn’t stop trembling as he heard one of his dead captains over in the corner of the room, discussing with another officer whether or not they ought to set up some neurological wards to deal with the effects of shell shock.

“Bad idea,” the captain said at once. “You realise they’d be magnets. Attracting all those officers with insufficient stoutness of heart. As surely as flies are drawn to shit.”

Fear was icy cold, but shame was a thing that burned so hot it was a miracle it didn’t incinerate him on the spot.

Chapter 30

Max couldn’t sleep. His chest was on fire, and he couldn’t lie still, and he couldn’t battle his memories, and he couldn’t stand it. His thoughts kept trying to return to plans of escape in the spring, but there was nothing to escape back to anymore. Finally, he struggled out of bed and slipped into the corridor, limping up and down the maze of hallways until he found himself out on the rooftop terrace. The servicemen came up here when the sun was shining sometimes, to rest on the loungers, or read books, or paint. The hotel staff had provided them with art materials, and some of the men had dabbled with paintbrushes to while away the time. Max had never been up here at night before, though.

It was clear and moonbright and he supposed it must be extraordinarily cold, yet he couldn’t feel it. The outline of mountains rose in the distance, their pitiless peaks piercing the very top of the world. The moon had tumbled down from the sky and drowned in the lake, the orb shining from beneath the black water. Snow lay all over the roof, glowing almost pale pink in the night. He knew something must have broken inside his head because he didn’t feel real. He wasn’t a person. He was a flock of black birds that were all flying in different directions, scattering towards the snowy peaks in the distance. He was here and not here. Already gone. Finished, at last.

As Max walked barefoot over the roof, he didn’t feel the cold of the snow underfoot. When he reached the balcony, he climbed up onto the low stone wall, sparkling and slippery with ice, and stared down at the long, long drop to the flagstones below. He must have been six or seven floors up. It’d probably be a quick death. One step; that’s all it would take. There was an icy breeze, but it didn’t touch him because he was already a ghost, just like the others.

A man climbed up onto the wall to his right; Max could see his coat out of the corner of his eye and guessed it was Thomas, come to be with him at the end. They stood side by side for a while, regarding the drop below, but then a woman’s voice said, “Bit cold for a walk, isn’t it?”

Max looked around and it wasn’t Thomas beside him at all, but Eve. For a moment, he thought he must be imagining her. But she didn’t melt away as he stared at her, just calmly held his gaze with her different-coloured eyes.

“What are you doing?” he croaked.

“What are you doing?” she countered.

“I’m…” His gaze slid to the drop again. His foot crept a tiny bit closer to the edge. “Well, I’m…I just don’t see any point, that’s all. To any of this. I feel so damned strange, and I can’t find my way back to how I was before. I’ve…I’ve only got half a soul left.”

Eve was silent for a moment. Then she carefully reached for his hand, brushing his fingertips with hers. “Thomas knew you,” she said quietly. “The real you. What would he say?”

“What?”

“Thomas. If he was here with us now, what would he say to you?”

“He would…well, he’d say…”

“Get down from there, you blasted fool!”

Max heard the words clearly and realised that Thomas was there after all, leaning against the balcony beside Eve, the tip of his cigarette glowing red in the dark as he looked right at Max and shook his head with an expression of utter contempt. Max stared, but Thomas quickly vanished, leaving just a twist of smoke to mark where he had been. But his presence had shaken Max out of his own head and made him feel a tiny bit more like himself—or, at least, the man he used to be.

“Climb down,” he said to Eve beside him, horrified to see how close to the edge she was. One wrong move, one slip upon the ice, and they would both go over.

To his relief, she stepped down at once, offering her hand to help Max too. He took it, but then his heel slid on the icy stone and he felt himself fall towards the abyss that had seemed so welcoming a moment ago but now seemed wrong, all wrong. And worse, he was pulling Eve with him. He tried to let go, but she tightened her grip, and she was stronger than she looked, grinding the bones of his hand together, and then there were tentacles, eight of them, bursting from her chest to curl around him, twisting into his clothes, wrapping around his limbs.

Eve and the octopus dragged him bodily from the wall. He landed in a crumpled heap beside her and now he could feel the cold at last. The snow was soaking through his pyjamas and the air was freezing, sharp as bayonets in the dark. The tentacles were gone but he saw that Eve was bleeding, scarlet drops splattering onto the snow. And there was ink, too—on the snow, and on his pyjamas, and glistening upon the stone balustrades.

“What are you?” he gasped.

“A monster, I suppose.”

He wanted to deny it, but the words faltered in his throat. Ordinary women didn’t have tentacles. His head throbbed so badly that even his eyes ached.

“The tentacles…” he began.

“There isn’t a name for whatever I am,” Eve said.

“You’re bleeding—”

“It’ll be all right.”

She pulled a scarf from her pocket and used it to stop the bleeding. They were sat up now with their backs against the wall, and for the first time, Max noticed that the inky sky above was filled with an impossible number of impossibly bright stars. Part of him wished she had just let him go. It would have been easy to take one last step into the night, whereas the road ahead, back to normal life, was long and hard and his soul ached at the thought of attempting it.

“I don’t think I will ever be happy again,” he whispered, hardly realising that he was speaking out loud.

“Someone once told me that striving for happiness is a burden,” Eve said. “And that you should look for moments of contentedness in a life of quiet sadness instead.”

“Good advice,” Max muttered.

“It was terrible advice,” Eve replied. “Listen, quiet sadness is no good. It’s not enough. You should not aim for that. You should never aim for that. You should pursue a life of the fiercest happiness instead. With everything you’ve got.”

“I’m afraid of being happy,” he said. “Aren’t you? Isn’t anyone with any sense? Why do you care anyway? What’s one more broken serviceman to you?”

Eve was silent for a moment, then she said, “You are not broken. Don’t say that. And don’t think it.” She stood up. “Come on. Come back to bed.”

His head was such a tangled mess that for a wild moment he thought she meant her bed. And for an even wilder moment, it felt normal, and right, and like something she had said to him dozens—no, hundreds—of times before. Like they were a couple and had been for decades. He could almost feel pale, ghostly tentacles winding their way into all the dark corners of his soul, all those parts that were broken and bruised, and he wondered if Eve could be a witch, if that could be the explanation, if it was the only one that made any sense. He realised suddenly that he was the one now wearing the coat, that she must have slipped it around his shoulders at some point and that she was shivering in the night.

And he also realised, as he followed her from the roof, that he had not thanked her for saving his life. He wondered if he should do so now. He wanted to give back the coat, but she was walking so quickly that he almost struggled to keep up. Soon they were back inside, in one of the bathrooms, and he was scrubbing the ink from his skin while Eve went to fetch him some spare clothes. She seemed to be gone a curiously long while, and he was shivering again with the cold by the time she passed a clean set of hospital blues through the door. When he finally got back to his bed, he wanted only to close his eyes and not think about anything at all.

Chapter 31

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

Eve was still puzzling over the rather strange way her afternoon tea with Mrs. Roth had ended as she pressed the button for the lift. The golden birdcage glided down through the floors to collect her and when she stepped inside, she saw that Alfie was operating the lift today.

“Afternoon, miss,” he said with a grin. He looked so friendly and normal that it was hard to reconcile the strange image of him standing silently at the windows of the restaurant, a short while ago, with that grave expression on his face. “Floor five?”

“No, floor six, please,” Eve said as the grille slid closed behind her.

Alfie raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? Nothing up there but staff quarters.”

“I’d like to go to floor six,” Eve repeated.

She wondered whether Alfie might refuse. Perhaps he’d say that the sixth floor was off-limits to guests. But instead, he just gave a good-natured shrug and pressed the button for the top floor. The lift clanked into life and the view of the lobby shrank as the lift ascended. For a moment, she could still see Max talking to Tristan in front of the grandfather clock. Then the clock, the fountain, and the rest of the lobby dropped away as they rose through the floors. Before long, the lift stopped at the top of the hotel and the door slid back, revealing a long corridor, much like the ones Eve had seen below, with a row of identical doors stretching down its length, all with shining brass numbers fastened to them. There was no sign of any tentacles.

“Just press the button if you need me,” Alfie said.

The grille slid back, and Eve watched as the lift descended into the hotel, leaving her alone on the sixth floor. It was oddly still and quiet up here compared to the hustle and bustle of the guest floors below. There was no murmur of voices, no doors opening and closing, no tread of feet upon the marble tiles. The silence reminded Eve of the hotel as it had been when she explored its deserted shell.

There were no paintings or clocks upon the walls, and no octopuses in sight. The doors were all closed, and Eve didn’t try to gain entry. If they were staff quarters, then they were private and unlikely to contain any of the objects she was looking for. Her mind was a tangle of confused thoughts as she pictured her younger mother and self downstairs—the intensely strange feeling of being both glad and sad at the same time. Glad to see her mother again, but sad at how far away she was now and the knowledge of how quickly their lives were going to unravel. She pushed the sadness away. Held on to the anger instead. She could still hear the tick and tock of the grandfather clock inside her head and felt a sudden strong urge to punch the wall. What use was rewinding time by five minutes? What possible fucking use was that to anybody here? Why couldn’t the clock have been there in her house on her fourth birthday? Five minutes of rewound time was all it would have taken that day. Five minutes was all it would have taken to change everything, but she needed far more than that now.

I don’t think I’m very good at it…. Being a mother….

Jane’s words rang in her head and Eve clenched her fists. She was no good at being a daughter. And even worse at being a sister. Just not really very good at being a human being in general. A gate creaked loudly inside her head, and she did it this time, she punched the wall, and her fist went right through the wallpaper and the plaster, and a huge white tentacle burst through the hole and wrapped itself all the way up her arm, squeezing tight, and she was wearing a white shirtdress instead of the black polo-neck, so the ink left stains that gleamed darkly as she breathed hard and breathed hard and breathed hard. And, as always, she was grateful to the tentacle, grateful to the octopus that was holding her here and keeping her grounded. But today the tentacle did more than that. Today, the tentacle dragged her right up to the wall.

Like on the lower floors, the wallpaper was green and white stripes with a seaweed motif. Eve found herself pressed against it, and the wall was solid until it wasn’t. It began to waver, like water, and the tentacle tightened its grip and pulled her all the way through, to whatever waited on the other side.

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 began to walk down the corridor. There was a painting of a disembodied head, and another of a freshly dug grave, and one more of a fumsup charm, its glass eyes staring at her blankly. Many of the paintings portrayed keys—always three of them. Keys in crypts or coffins or clocks. Keys tangled up with tentacles and tree roots. Usually they were silhouettes, but one painting showed them in more detail and Eve recognised them as room keys from the hotel. There was her own key, to Room 27. Another key for Room 17. And one for Room 7.

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.”

Chapter 33

Max was still staring at Eve like she was a ghost. “Here,” he whispered. “Take my coat.”

“I don’t want your—” she began, but he’d already removed it and thrown it towards her. She caught it instinctively, covering it in ink and making it pointless to pass it back.

“The stains probably won’t come out,” she warned, slipping it on, finding the woollen material still warm from his body.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I owe you a coat. How are you doing this? How are you moving about through time like this?”

“I already told you. I have a key. And anyway, you’re doing it too. You came to see me in 2016.”

“Twenty sixteen?” Max slowly shook his head, aghast.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, I do. That’s the problem. You were there, back in 1918. You saved my life, right here on this very roof. Can you use this key to get back?” Max asked. “To your own time, I mean?”

“Yes, but only if I check out for good and sacrifice all my memories of the hotel.”

“Is there any possibility that I might persuade you to do so?”

“None at all,” Eve replied levelly. “Not until I’ve finished what I came here to do.”

Max scowled. “I don’t wish to offend you, but aren’t you a little old for scavenger hunts?”

Eve wiped away a trickle of ink that was running slowly down from her hairline, heading straight for her eye. “If you don’t wish to be offensive, then try not saying offensive things.”

“It isn’t safe,” Max replied. “You were here in 1918. I’ll swear it in front of the Eavesdropper if you wish. So why are the Roths denying all knowledge of you?”

“Perhaps they don’t remember,” she said. “Maybe they forgot me. The hotel works differently for time-travelling guests. They tell me we pay for our stay with our memories of our time here. The bellhop explained that when I check out, I’ll forget everything that happened at the hotel. Maybe it works both ways? Perhaps the staff will forget about me as well.”

“Convenient,” Max replied. “But if you won’t listen to me, then perhaps you might listen to yourself. You wrote to me, just last week. I can show you the postcard and your own words printed there. Why would you ask me to come and help if you weren’t in trouble?”

Eve shook her head. “I didn’t send it. I couldn’t have. I wasn’t here last week. Someone must be playing a joke on you. Besides, I don’t need any help.”

“What an idiotic statement. Everyone needs help sometimes. It’s…”

He trailed off, frowning at the lake. Eve turned to follow his gaze. Unlike yesterday, there were no pleasure boats out on the water today. In fact, there was only a single boat sailing towards the hotel, about halfway across. There were two men in it, both dressed in black coats and top hats. And lying in the body of the boat was a gleaming dark coffin, stark and incongruous against the sunshine and the blue water. Somewhere downstairs, there had been a death.

“I need to get changed.” Eve gestured at her ink-splattered clothes.

“Wait.” Max followed her to the door. “I spent six months at this hotel in 1918. I know a couple of its secret octopuses and will gladly show them to you. Only a fool would refuse to accept help freely offered, and I know you’re not one of those.”

Eve paused. What harm could it do? Anna hadn’t said anything about working alone. “All right,” she said. “Meet me in the Palm Bar for cocktail hour.”

She took the stairs and managed to slip into her room without anyone seeing her. She knew from experience that octopus ink was difficult to scrub off and it took some while in the bathroom to remove all traces from her skin and hair. Finally, though, she lay in the bath, filled almost to the brim with clean, hot water. The tattoo had returned to its rightful place on her thigh and was innocently motionless, almost as if it were a perfectly normal tattoo on a perfectly normal woman.

She lingered for longer than she’d meant to, her head full of the things Max had said and all those strange paintings hidden behind the wall. She kept thinking of that last painting in particular—the man and woman perched on the edge of the roof, those dark wings of shadow filling the sky. And the keys. Three rooms with sevens in them. Eventually, the water began to cool and Eve got out of the bath and dried herself quickly. She’d tossed her ink-stained outfit, including Max’s coat, back into the wardrobe and when she opened the door now it had all vanished, to be replaced with suitable attire for cocktail hour: a dark blue lace dress with a silk liner and sheer sleeves.

Once she’d dressed, she took the stairs to the floor below and paused outside Room 17, trying to work out whether there might be anyone in there. There was no sound from within and no answer when she knocked. The same was true for Room 7.

When Eve arrived at the Palm Bar there were several guests there already, elegant in their gloves and velvet as they enjoyed pre-dinner cocktails. All around, the room buzzed with talk of the scavenger hunt. There was no sign of any Eavesdropper behind the curtain tonight. She joined Max at the bar.

“I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said.

“It takes a while to wash away octopus ink.” She glanced over at his drink—a cloudy green concoction served in a crystal coupe and garnished with a single dark rose petal. “What’s that?”

“A Death in the Afternoon,” Max replied. “Champagne and absinthe. Seemed fitting after seeing that undertaker’s boat. I found out who it was, by the way, the person who died. It was Mrs. Roth, the resident historian. Old age, apparently. No hint of foul play, if the staff can be believed. Not a murder weapon in sight.”

Eve thought of the woman she’d had tea with just a few hours ago and felt a little flutter of sadness.

“And you don’t think the cocktail is in poor taste at all?” she asked, glancing towards Harry, who was serving someone on the other side of the bar. Mrs. Roth had been a member of his family, after all.

“What, because of the old dear?” Max shrugged. “Why should she mind? She’s the lucky one, dying peacefully in her sleep in her nineties. No one gets a better result than that.”

Eve supposed he was right, but still, she felt sorry for the remaining Roths. Losing loved ones was hard at whatever point it happened.

Harry came over to them then. “What can I get you, Miss Shaw?” he asked.

“A scotch, please.”

“On the rocks?”

She winced. “Neat. And, listen, I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Roth.”

The barman inclined his head. “Thank you. We’ve lost too many people in our family lately; my parents both died last year. But the hotel will go on and that’s what matters most, to all of us.”

Only it won’t, Eve thought. The White Octopus Hotel will close its doors for good tomorrow. It’ll fall into ruin beyond repair. It’ll be a shell.

For a brief flicker of a moment, Eve saw the Palm Bar decaying around her. She made out the graffiti and the broken glass and the rotten furniture. Max remained beside her on the bar stool, but he was the old, old man who’d limped into her office. The man who’d died on the steps outside.

“There’s a sort of delicious temptation in it, do you not think?” Max asked now, and suddenly the Palm Bar was back to normal, all black velvet and golden palms. And Max was in his thirties again, dark eyes like magnets as he looked at her. Eve still wasn’t sure that you could call him handsome in the conventional sense, but there was something about him that drew her in. Something that made her hungry to know him better. Something that made her wish they could be normal people meeting under normal circumstances.

“A temptation in what?” she asked, lighting a cigarette of her own.

Max smiled slowly. “Well, if you’re to give up your memories of this place when you leave, then you could be as wicked as you like and wouldn’t have to burden yourself with the memory of it afterwards. No regrets. No nightmares.”

Eve shrugged. “I’d prefer to remember it all.”

I’d prefer to remember you, she added silently.

And yet…there was something a little freeing in the idea that, one way or another, none of this would matter later. Either she would forget about Max once she checked out or, if she was successful, then her past would be rewritten without him in it at all. For a while, they drank and smoked in silence. The other guests were discussing the scavenger hunt and Eve heard little snippets of the conversation filtering through the hubbub.

“They say there was a real octopus in the walls….”

“I spoke to him on the phone, my husband. He died three years ago….”

“Something not right about this place….”

“Got half a mind to check out this very night….”

“They say one of the octopuses is hidden in the past….”

“He coughs whenever a lie is uttered….”

Eve’s eyes slid towards the curtains, and she saw that the Eavesdropper was back, the tips of his shabby shoes poking out from beneath the hem.

“Who do you suppose he is, really?” Max asked, following her gaze.

Eve shook her head. She had no answer. All she had was questions piled on top of more questions. “Maybe he’s just a lost soul,” she said. “Maybe he feels safe at the hotel.”

“I say,” came a loud voice.

Eve glanced around and recognised the thin man from the Smoking Room earlier.

“Is it true what people are saying about the basement?” he asked. “And the forbidden objects?”

Harry glanced up with a sigh. “There are no forbidden objects in the basement, sir.”

Behind the curtain, the Eavesdropper gave one of those terrible, wet, choking coughs. Then the curtain rippled as he shuffled his feet and was gone. To Eve’s surprise, the guest didn’t say any more about the basement, but simply ordered a Sidecar and then retreated to a table by himself on the other side of the room.

“I apologise for not recognising you before,” Max said, draining his drink. “If our roles had been reversed, then I suspect you would have known me at once, but I’m a dense fellow at times. Not dense enough to leave a friend in the lurch, though. I can say that for myself, at least.” He flicked a glance at her. “I realise you don’t know me yet, but you and I are very old friends. So I meant what I said about helping with the scavenger hunt.”

“Friends or not, why would you help me?” she asked. “If you believe a hotel key is letting me travel through time, then you must accept the other objects here could be magical too. Don’t you want to win a prize for yourself?”

Max shrugged and looked back at his empty glass. “I already told you. You saved my life. I owe you.”

“Aren’t you curious about what object I’m pursuing?”

“What difference does it make?”

It could make all the difference to you, Eve thought. If she changed the past and prevented Bella from dying, then Eve herself would never come to the White Octopus Hotel in the first place. And if Max was right about her saving his life in 1918, then that meant she wouldn’t do that either. Which meant…what? That Max died in 1918? She thought of that painting again, of the two people on the edge of the roof, the sinister dark wings that filled the air around them. A gate creaked loudly inside her head, and she suppressed a shudder. She wasn’t responsible for what happened to Max Everly. She was responsible for what had happened to Bella. She snapped open the clutch bag and handed over the scavenger card. Still five clocks and sixteen octopuses to go.

“Here,” she said. “Take a look, if you want.”

Their fingertips touched briefly, and she felt a shiver ripple over her skin.

“I haven’t been to the steam baths yet,” she added. “They told me it was closed again this morning.”

“There are several clocks and octopuses there,” Max said. “There’s one in the Gatsby Room too.”

The Gatsby Room was a small, private dining room close to the main restaurant. “I went in there earlier, but I didn’t see it,” Eve said.

Max indicated her scavenger card. “Shall I write it in?”

She shook her head. She had the feeling she needed to see all the clocks and octopuses for herself or else perhaps it might not count. Certainly, she wasn’t going to take any chances. She drained the whiskey in one gulp and stood up.

“Show me.”

Chapter 34

Max wound his way through the maze of the hotel to a corridor near the restaurant. A bronze plaque on the door read The Gatsby Room.

“She only comes out when needed,” Max said.

“She?”

“Come and see.”

He held the door open, and Eve walked into the space she’d explored earlier. It was set up as a private dining room, with a long walnut table and banquet chairs. The walls had clearly once been hung with Nikolas Roth’s paintings, but as elsewhere in the hotel, there were only now blank squares in their places, except for one spot that had been hung with another ghastly Bouguereau. Eve recognised The Kiss—a painting of a woman with her cherublike infant child, exchanging the kiss of the title. An abundance of rosy cheeks, and tumbling curls, and adoring looks. Like the others, it was thoroughly dull. Large windows on one side of the room offered views across the lake, slowly turning silver with the night.

“They have private functions in here,” Max said. Then he cleared his throat and added, “We only have thirteen guests tonight.”

At his words, the octopus appeared immediately at the head of the table. It was a beautiful wooden sculpture, tentacles curling in elegant loops around it.

“The others called her Cleo,” Max said, “but perhaps she has different names to different people. Have you heard the tale about thirteen people sitting down to dine at the same table?” He arched an eyebrow. “Or are people more enlightened in your time?”

“I know the story,” Eve replied. “If thirteen people eat together at the same table, then the first to leave will die before the year is out.”

He nodded. “This table seats up to fourteen guests, as you can see. On occasion, there might only be thirteen. And when that happens, this octopus arrives to be the fourteenth guest. The staff even serve it a meal.”

“Have you eaten here yourself then?” Eve asked.

“Once, before I left the hotel in 1918. They threw a farewell dinner for the servicemen. We made up thirteen until Cleo arrived.”

Eve’s eyes went to the walls. “And the original paintings. Were they still here?”

“They were. And nothing like these sickly things. The opposite. There was something dark and disturbing about them. They drew you in. Got inside your head. Matron said they weren’t Roth’s own paintings, though. She wasn’t sure who had painted them.”

“That’s odd. Did you ever meet Nikolas Roth himself?”

“No. I only saw him from a distance.”

“And was I there? At this dinner?”

Slowly, Max shook his head, his face suddenly flushed. “No. You were supposed to be, but then you never turned up. That was why there were thirteen of us that night. Matron said you were ill.”

Eve looked back at Cleo. She didn’t like the fact that there were secret octopuses like this. It would be almost impossible to find them if you didn’t already know they were there. Her mind went to the octopus sculpture up in her room, the one Max had given her in 2016, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps it was itself one of the hotel’s octopuses; perhaps it belonged somewhere inside the building. The hook on top of its head indicated that it had clearly once been attached to something else, but she couldn’t think of a single place where it might fit.

When she described the ornament to Max, he shrugged. “I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that. There are a couple of octopuses that only come out after dark, though. The hotel changes at night. Let’s get something to eat and then I’ll show you.”

“All right. Thank you.”

He turned to the octopus and said, “Good night, Cleo.”

The sculpture immediately vanished, seconds before three women in evening gowns and loops of pearls burst into the room, all holding scavenger hunt cards in their gloved hands.

“See, I told you,” one of them said. “There’s nothing here.”

“But it was there in the photo,” another one said. “I saw it in the Reading Room.”

“Shall we?” Max pointed at the exit.

Eve followed him out to the corridor. This one, like many of the others, was lined with photographs. Some were missing, leaving empty frames upon the walls, but a good number remained. And as they were heading towards the lobby, Eve caught sight of one that made her stop.

The photo depicted a wrought iron staircase inside the hotel. Gathered along the landing and standing on the stairs was a group of twelve servicemen in their ill-fitting hospital uniforms. Some had sleeves or trouser legs pinned up due to missing limbs. The ties seemed an odd addition, as if they were all about to head to the office. And there, at the top of the staircase, one hand resting on the banister, was Eve. She looked just as she did now, except for the fact that she was wearing a nurse’s uniform. Her head spun as she looked into her own different-coloured eyes—apparent even in a black-and-white photo. Standing beside her was Max as a younger man, looking gaunt in his hospital uniform.

“Christ, I hated that suit,” Max said, stepping to her side. “Damned thing had no pockets for cigarettes.”

Eve couldn’t tear her eyes from the photo. It seemed impossible, and yet there it was.

Noticing her expression, Max raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t believe me? About 1918?”

“No, I believed you but…It’s strange, that’s all, seeing it like this. What happened? That night on the roof?”

Max put his hands in his pockets, shrugged slightly. “I got it into my head to jump, that’s all.”

Eve thought of that dark day on the motorway, the grit and the spray and the sickening urge to put an end to it.

“And how did I stop you?” she asked quietly.

“Well, you were there, and you talked some sense, and you were a…a hand in the dark. Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He glanced at her. “There were tentacles too.”

Eve looked away, felt a flush creeping over her skin. What did he mean? What had he seen? She couldn’t quite bear to ask. Then her eye fell on a figure in the photo, stood in shadow in the doorway just behind Eve and Max. It was impossible to make him out in any detail.

“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing.

Max leaned a little closer to get a better look. “I don’t know. I didn’t realise there was anyone there at the time. Nikolas Roth, perhaps? I can’t think who else it would have been. He never spoke to any of us, but we were aware of him lurking in the shadows sometimes. We always got the impression that he didn’t much care for the servicemen, that he would have preferred it if we’d never come to his hotel at all….”

I should say something, Eve thought. I should tell him that I want the writing paper, and why, and what it might mean for him if I succeed. It’s what a decent woman would do….

“Listen,” Max said. “There were…some things about that time that I got wrong. With you. When I first arrived at the hotel I…I wasn’t myself. Shell shock, they called it. You helped me and I’ll always be grateful to you for that, but there was a…a misunderstanding between us.”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “What sort of misunderstanding?”

He opened his mouth, but words appeared to fail him. After a moment, he clamped his jaw shut, but the expression on his face made a sudden chill touch Eve’s blood.

“You said we were friends,” she pointed out.

“Yes. But friends hurt each other sometimes,” Max said, avoiding her gaze. “That’s why we’re all better off alone, in the end.”

Chapter 35

Max—The White Octopus Hotel, 1918

He was in the dugout with Thomas and they were looking for a particular record—“Frog Legs Rag”—and Max didn’t notice that Thomas had picked up one of his notebooks and was flipping through the pages until he went completely still.

“Did you write this?”

“What?” Max’s eyes fell upon the notebook. It was filled with compositions he was working on, had been working on for quite a while, but he’d never shown them to anyone. He flushed, knowing that Thomas could read music. “Yes, but I mean, obviously, they’re not finished yet and—”

“Everly!” Thomas was staring at him with the oddest expression. Were the songs really that bad? With a shake of his head, Thomas held the notebook out to him. “My dear fellow,” he said quietly. “You’re going to be one of the greatest composers this world has ever seen.”

Max laughed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t know about that.”

He reached out, but it was no longer a book in Thomas’s hand, it was a grenade. His friend’s eyes slid slowly to his. “It’s my last time over the top,” he whispered.

And then the bomb exploded.

Max woke up screaming and it took a while before he realised where he was and with whom.

“Come with me,” Eve said quietly.

It was the middle of the night and she led him down a maze of corridors and staircases until they reached the deserted lobby of the hotel. It was past midnight. There wasn’t a soul around and the only illumination came from a row of candles glowing in their silver holders atop the grand piano in the corner, making it seem as if the instrument shone beneath a spotlight.

“Sit.” Eve indicated the piano stool. “It’s hard to know what’s real sometimes when there are so many ghosts crowding the room. But music makes everyone less afraid—even ghosts.”

It had been such a long time since Max’s hands had touched piano keys. On the last occasion he’d seen a piano there had been blood and bombs. He found himself telling Eve what had happened to Captain Young and was grateful when she didn’t say anything. There were no words that could possibly be suitable, but the touch of her hand on his shoulder reminded him that he wasn’t entirely alone in this moment. He glanced at her spotless nurse’s uniform, and it was a relief to see someone unmarked by the gore and gas of the war.

He wanted to thank her for listening, for being there, for reminding him that there was kindness and gentleness in a world that had gone mad. Only he knew he wouldn’t be able to find the right words. For a wild moment, he thought of kissing her instead. But she was clean and whole, and he was dirty and damaged, and it could not be.

When he finally summoned the courage to open the lid of the piano keys, he wondered whether he might have forgotten how to play music altogether. The notes all seemed to jerk and jumble inside his head. But then Eve reached out and pressed down on middle C—the clear, perfect note rang through the room in such a pleasing, peaceful way that Max pressed it again. And again. And again. Relishing the purity of the sound before it faded softly back into nothing.

Then both his hands were on the keys, and he was playing a piece he remembered from his childhood—a simple little tune that his mother used to play. A song that immediately brought back the safe feeling of arms wrapped around him in a hug, playing with a ball and stick in the garden as nightingales sang from the trees, lying in clean sheets at night as a fresh breeze brushed against the curtains and people who loved him moved about downstairs.

After that, his fingers ached to play every beautiful song he could recall. Songs that reminded him of friends and family, past joys and hopes, every moment that had in any way been good, and true, and worth something. He was glad of Eve still sitting beside him, because music meant more if there was another person there to hear it too—especially if it was a person you cared for. He didn’t know why that should be, but it simply was. The music yearned for an audience. He played for hours, until the sun rose outside and light spilled in through the windows, painting the pillars golden.

“Can I come back?” Max asked. “To play the piano again?”

“Whenever you like,” she replied.

Max looked at her. The morning light across her face was beautiful—she was beautiful—and he felt that familiar intense gladness that came from being close to her. He thought again that she must be a witch who had cast a spell over him. He didn’t want to feel this way. He didn’t want the tormented tug that comes from yearning to see a person day after day. He told himself it was a good thing that he would leave the hotel soon and never see Eve Shaw again. He hoped that she would return to England and meet a nice fellow who had survived the war with his soul intact, and would treat her well, and make her happy.

“If you ever need anything,” he found himself saying, “anything at all, then just send word. It won’t matter what I’m doing or where I am. I’ll come and find you.”

Chapter 36

Max—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

The previous night, Max had helped Eve locate several more octopuses and another clock for the list. There were just eleven octopuses and four clocks to go now. During their search, Eve had shown Max the octopus sculpture she’d told him about too, the one with the hook on its head that he had apparently travelled through time to deliver to her himself. There was something maddeningly, infuriatingly familiar about it, as if he had seen it many times before, yet he couldn’t place where. And although they searched the hotel together, they found no place where it might conceivably belong.

They’d made no firm arrangement about where they would meet the next day, so Max found himself heading to the Music Room—a place he had returned to several times since his arrival. It contained a gramophone and a vast number of records, but he was more interested in the music boxes. They lined the shelves in every conceivable design, from enamelled musical powder compacts and Reuge singing birds to golden ormolu musical clocks and shimmering Bakelite boxes in geometric panels of ruby and pearl. As with the hotel walls, there was a great deal of empty space on the shelves. Some items in the collection were clearly missing.

Max had listened to all the music in the boxes that remained, and none could claim to be the most beautiful in the world or even come close to such an absurd standard. But there was one that he’d returned to several times now. All gleaming golden wood, it was an Italian musical lipstick box by Lador. Once wound, the six glossy doors opened out and spun around the core in a slow circle, showing off the brass lipstick holders nestled into their red velvet linings. At the very centre was a small ornamental mirror.

He wound this music box now and marvelled at the perfect grace of the mechanism as it opened out and started to spin. The box played a rendition of “Valzer delle candele”—or “Auld Lang Syne” as it was better known back home: For the sake of old times. Max loved the tune, but it made him ache inside as well. There were too many old times that were gone, and gone for good, and it hurt to remember them and the friends and family he’d never meet again.

He took a deep breath as the song played on. Some days Max didn’t want to forget, but there were times when he couldn’t bear to remember either. Yet this was the music box that he had wound over and over again. The tiny mirror at the centre reflected back a small fragment of the room, but the image was permanently interrupted by the revolving carousel of doors. Max saw Anna, though, when she appeared behind him, her scarlet dress catching his eye in the glass.

“That was one of my mother’s favourites,” she remarked. “She always kept it on her dressing table.”

“Did she mind?” Max asked without turning around.

“About?”

He shrugged. “All of it, I suppose. The fact that she was hidden away in Nikolas Roth’s shadow. The fact that her husband was sending flowers to another woman.”

“What other woman?”

“The VAD who took care of me when I was last in the hotel.” He deliberately did not mention her name. “Your father sent her flowers, every week.”

Anna lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t suppose any wife would much like her husband sending flowers to another woman.” But there was something oddly smug in her gaze that set his teeth on edge.

“No, I don’t suppose they would. You told us that night that it was Nikolas Roth who suddenly wanted to see Eve, but that was a lie, wasn’t it? It was his wife who sent for her.”

“It was time for her to check out.”

“And you’re angry that she came back, is that it? Is that the reason for the charade?”

Anna slowly shook her head. “Why should I be angry? I wanted her to come back. It’s what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”

“Then why did you pretend that you didn’t know her?”

“Well, I don’t,” Anna said with a shrug. “Not really.”

I desperately need your help….

The words from Eve’s postcard were burned into his mind.

Please come to the White Octopus at once….

He saw Anna as a girl back in 1918. The snow melting on her boots, that strange expression on her face as she summoned Eve back to the hotel, and that was it—the last time he saw Eve Shaw until she walked into the Palm Bar seventeen years later in that extraordinary black-and-gold dress. His brain ached with the riddle of it all, of trying to assemble all the pieces in the correct order to work out what happened to Eve, and when it happened, and what could be done about it.

Could he force or frighten the truth out of Anna?

The question appeared unbidden and unwelcome in his mind. But, after all, why not? He already knew that he was a violent man; he must be to have killed so many people. He was much bigger and stronger than Anna and they were alone in the room. What other options were there? He’d searched every corner of the hotel, questioned every member of staff, even found Eve herself. Yet still hadn’t found her—not really.

He turned around from the music box. Took a step closer to Anna. “Tell me the truth,” he said in a low voice. “What happened to Eve in this hotel? And why are you lying about it?”

“Maybe it isn’t me who’s lying,” Anna replied, watching him carefully. “Maybe it’s Eve. Maybe that postcard she sent you was a fiction. A ruse to bring you here. Maybe I have done nothing wrong at all.”

He felt it, then, that urge to grab her, to hurt her and scare her and break his way through to the truth, no matter the consequences.

“You’ve got it all wrong, you know,” Anna said softly. She really did look so very much like Eve. They could almost have been sisters.

“I won’t check out,” Max said. “Not until I’ve done what I came here to do.”

Anna smiled, just slightly. “Mr. Everly,” she replied, looking him right in the eye, a hint of sadness in her voice. “You won’t be checking out of the White Octopus at all.”

Behind them, the Lador music box skipped a note; “Auld Lang Syne” stuttered to a halt and was replaced with a different song—one Max knew very well because he was the one who had composed it. In fact, he’d written the song right here, when he was nineteen and recuperating in 1918, a song called “Afternight.”

He turned from Anna, walked over to the box. He’d wound it several times while he’d been here, but it had only ever played “Auld Lang Syne” before, never this tune. He looked into the small mirror at the centre, and with each turn of the doors it suddenly seemed to him that his reflection became a little older and a little older—just a trick of the eye to begin with, but then, no, it was more than that because his hair was thinning and turning white too until there was a very old man staring at him out of the glass with watery eyes. Max jerked back, stumbling into the armchair behind him.

When he looked around at the doorway, he saw that Anna had gone, so she didn’t see the birds when they came out of the music box. Sleek, and black, and glossy, a great flurry of dark wings that filled the room, and when Max put his face in his hands he could feel the icy bite of snow beneath his bare feet, and the warmth of Eve’s fingers as she reached for his on that wall, and the smoothness of the flailing white tentacles that dragged him back from the abyss so roughly that they left bruises on his skin.

Put all the devils into the music. That’s the best place for them….

The music stopped and he heard the soft click of the doors on the box closing. When he looked up, the birds were gone, and the Music Room was just as it had been before. He reached for his handkerchief, wiped away the sweat that had formed at his hairline.

Music can…it can make you feel a lot of things at once, Eve had said that day in the Fountain Room.

That was true anywhere, but Max thought it was nowhere truer than at the White Octopus Hotel. He swept his eyes around the room one final time, looking for beaks and wings and the beady eyes that never stopped watching him, but there wasn’t so much as a feather. He shouldn’t be here, he realised. He should be wherever Eve was. He went out to the corridor and walked quickly through the various reception areas, eventually finding her looking at old photographs in the Reading Room.

Today she wore a bottle-green velvet dress, belted at the waist, with nude stockings and heels. It occurred to Max then that whether she was wearing a silk evening gown or a starched nurse’s uniform, there was something effortlessly elegant about Eve Shaw. In fact, she was elegant even when she wore no clothes at all….

The memory flashed into his mind, unbidden and unwanted, of his hands gliding over her bare skin, her voice low and husky as she whispered his name in his ear.

Max…

He forced the image away, deliberately turned his attention to the walls instead, desperate for anything he might find there that could distract him from that day seventeen years ago. Sometimes, a person did not think of you the way you thought of them. Sometimes you forgot yourself for a while and entertained wild notions about happiness and love and family and home—even though you knew well enough that those simple joys were for other people and not for you.

Eve was currently looking at a photograph on the wall that had been taken of that final dinner in the Gatsby Room. Twenty-year-old Max was there, third from the right, dressed in his lieutenant’s uniform. Also at the table were the other servicemen who’d been interned with him. And, finally, there was Mrs. Jones, the matron. Everyone was there, except for Eve. Everyone was looking at the camera, except for Max. He was staring down at his plate instead, eyes fixed upon the octopus crest on the lavender-grey porcelain as his mind blazed with the memory of what had just happened in the steam baths. He remembered how, throughout the meal, he’d kept glancing at the door, hoping that Eve would appear. But, of course, she never did, and the role of fourteenth guest was assigned to Cleo.

Matron’s voice echoed down the years to him: I can’t think what’s keeping Eve.

It’s my fault, Max wanted to say. I crossed the one line I wasn’t supposed to cross….

He’d glanced at the other men, wondering if they could tell that something had happened, but all anyone wanted to speak of at that dinner was the music box and that melody that spilled from it, the most beautiful song in the world….

“There you are,” Eve said now, looking at him with the different-coloured eyes that he had always found so bewitching. She pointed at the photo. “This is the dinner you talked about, isn’t it?”

Max nodded. “That’s it.”

He turned away from the photos to look at the opposite wall. This, he saw, was occupied by a framed collection of old cigarette cards. He recognised most of them and had many of these same cards back home in his London flat. There was the Famous Escapes series from Carreras. And over there the Ships’ Figureheads from John Player & Sons. On the other wall, he saw Old Inns from Lloyds.

And beside that was the Women at War Work set from Black Cat cigarettes. He recognised the porter, the lift attendant, and the tram conductor from his own collection. Then he spotted the VAD. He’d never managed to find that card himself, although he’d searched for it. The closest he’d come was the Red Cross nurse, but he’d always hoped to find the VAD one day.

Eve joined him. “There’s one missing,” she said, pointing at the single empty square at the bottom of the frame. The label beneath read: The Angel.

Max frowned. “That’s not right,” he said. “There wasn’t an angel. There were fifty cards in this set, not fifty-one. Someone got it wrong.”

“Maybe they did. Well, shall we head to the steam baths?”

“Breakfast first,” he insisted. He wasn’t especially hungry but felt the cowardly urge to delay the return to the steam baths for as long as possible.

“I heard one of the guests talking about an angel on a cigarette card earlier,” Eve said as they walked to the restaurant. “They said it was the object they were hoping to win in the scavenger hunt. Apparently, it has the power to save a person’s life.”

Max shrugged. He was thinking of the retreat from Mons and how the press had reported that there must have been angels protecting the British troops. He thought of Hugo, the inventor of the Aviator, swearing that he’d once seen an angel beside him in no-man’s-land. But it was not real, and life didn’t work like that.

“There are no angels,” he said. He spoke with more force than he’d intended to and glanced at Eve, hoping she wouldn’t think he’d snapped at her.

But she only shook her head and said, “No. I suppose there aren’t.”

After breakfast, it couldn’t be put off any longer and they made their way to the steam baths. Max tried to suppress a shiver as they passed through the grand arched door. They were provided with bathing suits and robes and shown to the wooden changing cubicles. Regret prickled beneath his skin, but he did his best to keep his face neutral as he joined Eve outside and followed her into the frigidarium.

Chapter 37

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

The bathing suit Eve had been given was very modest by the standards she was used to—more of a swim dress than a swimsuit—but it still felt odd to be wearing such a thing and she was grateful for the white robe. Despite how early it was, there were already several other guests enjoying the frigidarium, all wearing robes or bathing suits.

It was the most spectacular space, with grand Islamic arches and painted ceilings. Natural light flooded in through the skylights set into the arabesque painted ceiling, shining upon the neat rows of reclining beds that were lined up along the Italian terrazzo floor. A sign stated that this was the coolest room in the steam baths, but it was still warm compared to the hotel, heated with a continuous flow of hot, dry air. A large octopus was painted on the wall and Eve took the scavenger card from the pocket of her robe and wrote it in.

She now had ten octopuses and four clocks left. Getting closer…

“This is the Wellness Area,” Max told her. “The doorway at the end of the room leads to three more chambers that get gradually hotter. On the other side there’s a cold plunge pool and a warm mineral pool.” He gestured at another sign on the wall, which explained the ritual of heating, cooling, and cleansing the body as you progressed through the chambers. “Shall we get this over with?”

“You don’t like the steam baths?” Eve asked as they made their way past the rows of beds.

He shrugged. “It’s peaceful and restful and beautiful. What’s not to like? But it reminds me of being an invalid, and of a time of my life I’d prefer to forget.”

They passed through the archway into the first of the three heated rooms—the tepidarium, or warm room. It had the same curved ceiling and skylights, but the walls were glazed bricks in cream and sea green. Long stone benches lined the walls for guests to sit or lie on, and everyone had removed their robes due to the heat. Max and Eve soon had to do the same, and she tried hard not to look at the black shorts and dark blue tank top that made up Max’s bathing suit and showed off the lean muscle of his shoulders. Tried hard not to think once again about what this moment might have been like if they were normal people doing normal things in the normal way.

It was warm and pleasant in the tepidarium, but there were no clocks or octopuses there, so they went on to the caldarium, or hot room, where there were more glazed bricks and mosaic tiles fashioned into the shape of shells. A couple of guests soaked up the heat in large, solid wooden deck chairs draped with towels. Max didn’t linger here either but went straight on into the laconicum—the hottest room. Like the others, this was a beautifully ornate chamber, laid out with benches and deck chairs, but it was scorching, and Eve could feel sweat running down her body moments after they walked in.

“Over here.” Max went into the corner of the room and pointed out a small mosaic octopus upon the floor. Eve noticed as he did so that there were several small scars on his forearm.

“Shell fragments,” he said, seeing her looking.

“Sorry,” she said, annoyed with herself. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

He shrugged. “There aren’t any other octopuses or clocks in the chambers, as far as I know. Just one of each at the entrance to the pools.”

“All right, thanks,” Eve replied. “I’m going to look back through them again, just in case.”

“It’s too hot for me,” Max replied. “I’ll be in the pool when you’re done.”

They parted and Eve retraced her steps through the heated chambers, but there were no other clocks or octopuses to be seen, and before long she was making her way to the pool area. A wooden archway formed the entrance to this part of the steam baths, and as Max had said, there was a clock perched on top, held within the tentacles of a large wooden octopus. She marked both items off on the list. At last, she was down to single figures for the octopuses—just eight to go, along with three more clocks. She passed beneath the arch to the area beyond. Another archway on her right led to the cold plunge pool and the one on the left went to the warm mineral pool. Eve was dripping with sweat, so she picked the cold one and entered a room with glazed cream bricks on the wall and a blue-and-green tiled floor. The pool itself was blue and inviting and the room was unoccupied.

The water wasn’t just cold but icy—a welcome relief after the sweltering chambers. Eve ducked her entire head beneath the surface and when she came back up, she could suddenly hear the distinctive clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. For a moment, she thought perhaps it was the water ringing in her ears, but no, the horse was there; the horse was real. She wiped the water from her eyes in time to see it trot through the archway. A grey horse, streaked with dirt and mud, just like the one she’d glimpsed that night outside the windows of the Fountain Room, peering inside with deep, dark eyes.

The eyes and the music.

The music and the eyes.

And the hand holding hers in the dark…

The horse carried a couple of saddlebags, along with some loose items tied on with straps. Eve saw wire cutters, a gas mask, a bayonet sheath, and a trench periscope. Then the horse tossed its head and trotted briskly down the length of the pool, quickly disappearing through the archway at the opposite end.

She swam to the edge of the pool and climbed out. The horse had been filthy, yet there were no muddy hoofprints to mark its passage. She snatched up her robe and went out into the corridor, but there was no sign of the horse. When she walked through the doorway into the room with the warm mineral pool, she found it was much larger than the cold one, with its own marble fountain at the far end. It looked very much like the fountain in the lobby, except that this octopus’s tentacles trailed all the way into the pool itself. There were several guests here, swimming or relaxing on the loungers placed around the perimeter.

Max was swimming when she arrived but came out of the pool when he saw her. He grabbed up a towel and wrapped it around his shoulders before walking over. “Finished?” he asked.

“I just saw a horse by the plunge pool,” she said.

“Ah. The horse.”

“Did you see it too?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never seen it. The others used to speak of it, though. Back in 1918. There were twelve of us and everyone said they saw the horse in the steam baths at one point or another. Except me.”

“It looked like a war horse,” Eve said. “It had wire cutters, and a gas mask, and other things tied to its saddle.”

“Yes,” Max replied. “That’s the one. Eleven men don’t all imagine the same thing at different times, so I suppose it’s a ghost.”

“Why would a war horse haunt the steam baths?”

He shrugged. “Why would an eavesdropper haunt the Palm Bar, or an octopus haunt the sixth floor? The White Octopus is not like other hotels.”

They began to retrace their steps through the heated chambers until they were back in the vast frigidarium. As before, there were several guests enjoying the Wellness Area, reclining on the benches, or reading newspapers. A sense of calm tranquillity filled the space. Until the sound of hooves echoed upon the tiles.

Chapter 38

Max—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

The frigidarium filled with gasps and whispered exclamations. Eve turned to look at the horse, but Max remained staring straight ahead at the door leading to the changing rooms, his ears ringing with the clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop. Horses had been ever present at the Western Front. There had been supply horses, and ammunition horses, ambulance drivers and cavalry chargers. And then there had been the officers’ mounts. Max had had several because—one way or another—horses didn’t last long in a war.

But he knew somehow, before he even turned around, which horse this was. He couldn’t have said how he knew. There was nothing especially distinctive about the sound of one horse’s hoofbeats over another’s. But, still, he knew.

People were exclaiming and muttering as the horse stopped, right behind Max. He felt the huff of its warm breath in his hair, the affectionate nudge of his shoulder.

He closed his eyes briefly. “Hello, Stranger.”

He turned, bracing himself in case the horse looked the way it had when he’d last seen it. But, no, the grey stallion was dirty yet unharmed. Stranger’s coat was the exact colour of storm clouds, and his dark eyes were gentle and noble. The most impossibly majestic creature. Max had believed that there was a horse—a horse that, for some reason, chose never to appear to him even when it showed itself to all the others—but he had never dreamt that it would be his horse. So much more than a mount. A friend. A comrade.

He trembled as he raised a hand to place gently upon the horse’s muzzle. It had been too long since he had touched a horse, and he felt a deep rush of gladness, remembering anew how the presence of a horse at the front helped raise the morale of all who came into contact with it. They were magical beasts, and for a moment, the frigidarium and all the people inside it ceased to exist. It was only Max and the horse, staring at each other, and Thomas’s voice echoing down through the years.

That’s how many times I’ve been over the top. Four times already. This’ll be the last, I think….

Max had the exact same sense of clarity now. He looked at his horse and he knew, deep in his bones, that he wasn’t going to check out of the White Octopus Hotel. Not this time. Anna was right. It was a cold feeling, but somehow not as terrifying as he’d expected it to be. Stranger leaned into his touch, huffing out his breath again, before brushing past him towards the door.

Wait, Max wanted to call. Don’t go.

But the horse had not been a part of the world for a very long time now. It headed swiftly for the exit and as it passed beneath the archway, an object fell from one of its saddlebags. Max walked over to pick it up. It was a trench watch—something between a pocket watch and a wristwatch—of the kind that had been worn by many officers during the war. It was broken, the hands on its face were all still, but when he slid the watch from the wide leather strap and turned it over, he saw a familiar inscription engraved upon the back.

For Max. Love, Mother.

“Is it yours?” Eve asked quietly at his side.

He nodded. “I lost it. Back in the trenches.”

A couple of guests were coming over, eager to see what had fallen from the horse’s bag.

“It’s nothing,” he said in response to the questions. “Only a timepiece that no longer works.”

The guests wandered off, disappointed, but right at that moment, the watch suddenly started ticking again in his hand, the thin second hand moving rapidly around the face once more.

“Huh.” Max stared down at it. “Maybe it wasn’t broken at all. Perhaps it just couldn’t operate in the trenches.” He glanced at Eve. “We always used to say that time didn’t work in the same way there. Some nights it seemed to stop working altogether. You almost couldn’t call it time, it was…it was something else.”

“Why would a horse bring this back to you now?” Eve asked, narrowing her eyes at it. “What does it mean?”

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug, but he knew well enough what it meant. His time was finally up.

—

The rest of the day passed quickly with octopus-hunting. They were up to thirty-four of the sea creatures now and ten clocks, leaving only two octopuses and two clocks to go.

“Still no sign of the Sugar Room,” Eve said later that afternoon. “I don’t understand where it could be. Do you?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never seen or heard of such a place here.”

Eventually, they retired to the Reading Room, where Eve opened up a sketchbook and began doodling out a map of the ground floor. Max welcomed the opportunity to sit quietly with his thoughts for a moment, replaying the encounter with his horse over and over again. His skin still tingled with the thrill of it, the deep joy of being reunited with an old friend. At the same time, the shock felt a bit like a blow to the head; he could hear the echoes of it ringing inside his ears. The same thought flew through his mind.

This is the end of the road.

I will never see 1936.

I will never check out….

Did that mean he was going to die? Or simply vanish? Perhaps get lost within the hotel’s walls, like the octopus on the sixth floor? He recalled what Eve had said about how he’d visited her in 2016 as an old man. Could that be possible? It didn’t make sense, but then nothing much in this place seemed logical. The thought of old age was suddenly exhausting and unwelcome. He took a deep breath and looked out the window. Now, as in 1918, there was something about looking at the lake and the mountains outside that was deeply soothing. They were so old, so still, so unmoved by all of mankind’s trials and troubles. They’d been here long before Max arrived, and they’d still stand many years after he was gone. The thought was comforting. He was glad to have his trench watch back, although it was strange to see it ticking out the seconds normally. It was the last thing his mother had sent him before she died. A precious part of life before. Holding the watch in his hand made him feel closer to her than he had in many years.

Eventually, Max put the watch back in his pocket, beside the fumsup, and went over to look at Eve’s map. It was functionally accurate, showing the correct position and proportions of the various rooms. But the map was more than a map. It was beautiful too. She had decorated it with sketches of the golden palm trees in the Palm Bar, the fan mirror in the Smoking Room, the grandfather clock in the lobby, and a shower of musical notes made from water in the Fountain Room. In a separate building she’d drawn the steam baths, with their various chambers. There was a perfect charcoal sketch of Stranger in the frigidarium—a dirty war horse, stark against the splendour of Italian mosaics and Moorish arches.

“That is remarkably lovely,” Max said. He had to resist the urge to ask if he might have it, this perfect sketch of his most loved horse.

Eve glanced up. “I was hoping it might reveal the location of the Sugar Room, but I’ve mapped out the entire ground floor and there isn’t space for it anywhere. It must be a secret room, like the corridor I found. Mrs. Roth told me it appears at different times, for different reasons. It could be anywhere—on the roof, or in the nonexistent basement, or in the steam baths.”

At the mention of the steam baths, Max felt the sudden urge to apologise again for something that had happened seventeen years ago for him but hadn’t yet happened for her at all. Something he had believed at the time that they both wanted but later realised she hadn’t wished for at all. Even now, the regret was like a small piece of shell fragment that he couldn’t dig out of his skin.

“Perhaps it’s back there,” Eve suddenly said.

“What? Where?”

“The Sugar Room. Maybe it’s back there in 1918.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I saw a painting in the walls, of the three time-travelling keys.”

“There are three of them?”

“Mmm. Mine and two others. Perhaps one of them goes back to 1918.”

“Perhaps, but what has that got to do with the Sugar Room?”

“The keys all turned into sugar,” Eve replied. “While I was looking at them. And there was a guest in the Palm Bar last night. I heard her say that one of the octopuses is hidden in the past.”

“I don’t know,” Max replied. “I already told you that I didn’t see the Sugar Room, and I never heard anyone else mention it either. Let’s eat. They’ll be serving dinner by now.”

“All right. Shall we meet back downstairs in twenty minutes?”

Max nodded. “See you then.”

Chapter 39

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

Before changing for dinner, Eve wanted to check Rooms 17 and 7 again, to see if they were still unoccupied. As before, there was no answer to her knock on either door and no sign of occupancy. On her way down the corridor, she realised that she had left her map of the hotel downstairs in the Reading Room and made a mental note to go back for it after dinner.

In Room 27, she dressed quickly in a pale green lace gown edged with pearls. It had thin straps and fell low at the back, and her octopus wouldn’t keep still. It drifted up her arm, across her collarbone, over her right shoulder, down between her shoulder blades. And although Eve looked in the wardrobe for a shawl or cape or jacket, or perhaps another fur, there was nothing to cover her shoulders. Well, so be it. People would just have to see the octopus.

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.”

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.

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.

Chapter 42

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1918

When she looked out the window, Eve saw that the mountains were the same, and the lake was the same, but a new flag fluttered outside. The green hospital flag for health and healing. A note was propped up on the vanity table:

Dear Miss Shaw,

Welcome to the White Octopus Hotel. I trust you will enjoy your stay and please feel free to go wherever you like, but note that the sixth floor is off-limits both to yourself and to the servicemen.

Kind regards,

Nikolas Roth

The card was dated 12th June 1918.

I did it. I went back again….

There was a rap at the door, sharp and impatient. Eve opened it. This time there was no bellhop, no cocktail or sugar octopus. Instead, a hassled-looking woman of about fifty stood on the threshold, dressed in a pristine matron’s uniform.

“Here you are at last,” the woman exclaimed. “I expected you hours ago. Good grief, what on earth are you wearing? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m Mrs. Jones. You may call me Matron.”

“I’m Eve Shaw.”

“Well, Eve, you’d best get into your uniform quickly. Our men will be arriving at the station in an hour, and we ought to be there to greet them.”

Eve realised she must mean the POWs.

“Hurry up, for goodness’ sake,” Matron went on. “I’ll expect you in the lobby in five minutes.”

Then she was gone. When Eve looked out into the corridor a moment later, the lights were powered by gas rather than electricity, and there was the antiseptic smell of a sanitorium. She closed the door and turned back into the room. She wanted to go hunting for the last octopus and missing clocks at once but supposed she would have to play the part of a nurse in order to fit in here. She didn’t intend to do anything to risk being thrown out of the hotel.

She went to the wardrobe and found a nurse’s uniform hung up inside it. Within a few minutes she’d changed into the long, blue belted dress and slipped the white apron over the top, a Red Cross emblem emblazoned across the chest. It took a few attempts to pin the white cap to her head.

Then she went down to the lobby. The hotel in its new formation was both familiar and unfamiliar to her. Some parts remained the same, but there was no sense of celebration here anymore. No champagne or jazz. No elegant guests walking over the tiled floor and no one manning the reception desk. But the fountain still splashed and the grandfather clock continued to tick. Mrs. Jones was waiting by the front door, tapping her foot impatiently.

“At last,” she said. “Come along. The boat is waiting.”

Eve hurried after her out the door and onto the boat floating on the perfectly still lake. It seemed odd somehow, for the lake and mountains to be exactly as they’d been before. And the seasons were different here too, she realised. It was now summer, the air warm on her skin.

“You should know that I don’t have any nursing experience,” Eve began as the boatman pushed them off from the shore.

Matron gave a short laugh. “You’re a VAD. Of course you don’t. Pay close attention and do as I say and perhaps you might be some use to me in the end.”

The cable car had not yet been built, so they travelled by carriage, arriving at the station just as the train was pulling in. The Swiss townspeople were cheering and clapping and had even organised a children’s choir. When the train stopped and the servicemen began to step down onto the platform, Eve felt that same sense of disorientation that she’d experienced on first encountering people from the 1930s in their glamorous evening wear. It was hard to believe that these bewildered-looking men in their tattered uniforms were real, that they had actually fought in the First World War.

And then she saw him. Max Everly stood a few feet away and Eve was shocked by his appearance. She’d seen an old photo of him in his lieutenant’s uniform, but that had been right at the start of the war, when he’d first enlisted. Two years later, he looked older than nineteen and painfully thin, with dark hollows beneath his eyes, and cheekbones that pressed through his skin.

He folded up suddenly, like he was made from paper, and then he was on his knees on the platform, crying. Eve could feel the despair radiating from him—a feeling she could still remember experiencing herself, with perfect clarity, although it had taken place in a different world, and for different reasons. She went to kneel beside him, reached wordlessly for his hand. Max flinched at her touch at first, but when he saw her nurse’s uniform, he wrapped his fingers around hers and held on to her tightly. He was covered in dirt and grime, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to wash.

Eventually, after the other men had been taken to the waiting carriages, Mrs. Jones returned and helped Eve to get Max loaded on too. He did as they told him but didn’t speak during the entire journey back to the hotel. There were twelve servicemen in total, and they took them straight to the steam baths to wash. Those who could manage unattended—including Max—went through to the showers alone. But a few of the men, including one with an amputated leg, required help. Eve found herself assisting Matron to strip off their filthy clothes and then wash all the dirt and grime and lice from their gaunt bodies. There wasn’t room for embarrassment or awkwardness from anyone present. It was simply a job that needed to be done.

Afterwards, they escorted the men to the suite where they’d be staying. All the furniture had been removed to make space for single beds and there were a couple of nurse’s cots in the corner behind a curtain. Mrs. Jones informed Eve that she’d be on a rota of night duties along with the Swiss nurses also staying at the hotel. Once the men were settled in, Mrs. Jones sent Eve around with a brown paper bag full of pretzels. When she held one out to Max, he stared at it like he’d never seen anything so extraordinary. She expected him to take it eagerly, as the other men had done, snatching it straight from her hand, but instead he frowned and shook his head. He suddenly looked so angry that Eve didn’t know what to do. She thought of the things his future self had told her in 1935. The terrible sights he’d witnessed in the trenches. The fact that he’d had to shoot his friend to spare him the agony of a drawn-out death. No wonder he was angry. She would have been too.

“Perhaps later,” she said quietly, putting the pretzel down on the table.

She remained busy the rest of the afternoon, helping Mrs. Jones to change dressings and apply delousing tonics to the men’s hair. They were all crawling with fleas and lice.

“We’ll have to do several rounds of this,” Mrs. Jones told her. “And change the bedding and pyjamas daily for a while.”

“There’s no getting rid of ’em,” one of the men said. “You know, back at the camp, I once picked three hundred sixty-five lice off my shirt in a single night.”

“We shan’t have any lice here,” Mrs. Jones said firmly. “A couple of weeks at the most and they’ll all be gone, I promise you.”

The men all seemed pleased to be there—all except for Max, who still hadn’t spoken since he’d arrived and had refused to eat any of the food they’d offered. He simply sat, staring out the window in an unfocused way, like he wasn’t really seeing any of them at all.

“He’ll have to be sent away if he doesn’t eat,” Matron said to Eve later that afternoon.

“Sent where?” she asked.

Mrs. Jones shrugged. “To one of the military asylums, probably. We can deal with physical injuries here, but we’re not set up for broken minds.”

“He’s only just arrived,” Eve pointed out. “Perhaps he needs time to adjust.”

“He doesn’t have time,” Matron said. “He needs to start eating straightaway, even if he chooses not to speak to anyone. If he hasn’t had anything by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have to put in a referral to move him.” She sighed. “They’re unpleasant places, the asylums. I’ve heard reports of force-feeding and electric-shock therapy. It’s hard to know what’s true, because many men don’t ever come out. He’d be much better off here, with the fresh air and the mountains.”

Eve glanced at Max, feeling a new flicker of worry. But she already knew that he did stay here at the White Octopus, so surely that must mean that he would eat something soon?

Mrs. Jones told Eve to go and get some rest, since she and one of the Swiss nurses would be on the night shift later. Eve left the ward, but she didn’t return to her room. Instead, she began her search for the final scavenger hunt items. The hotel was like a ghost building, reminding her of the way she’d first seen it in 2016. It had that same eerie sunken-ship atmosphere. It seemed that there was hardly anything or anyone there except for the wounded men and the nursing staff. The majority of the rooms were empty, and many of the public rooms were shut up, the furniture covered in dust sheets. Eve peered beneath them all, but there was nothing. No octopus, no clocks, no Sugar Room, no magical objects.

She returned to the ward that evening in a bad mood. Max was still refusing food, even though Clara, the Swiss nurse, told her that she’d offered him slices of the best Gruyère cheese, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a Paris-Brest cream cake from the local bakery.

“He threw the cake on the floor,” she whispered. “The plate broke. Matron wasn’t happy. The porcelain all belongs to Nikolas Roth. She says that he’s to have only tin mugs and plates from now on.”

Eve glanced at the broken pieces of the plate in one of the bins at the nurses’ station. She saw it had been one of the lavender-grey ones with the octopus print, just like the tea set she’d discovered in France. And the teacup she’d smashed when she was three.

It was a restless night. Some of the men were in pain, some needed help getting themselves to the bathroom. And at about 3 a.m., Max woke up screaming.

It was a sound that Eve would never forget. Something about it made her think of the unseen Eavesdropper hiding behind the curtain in the Palm Bar and his dreadful, inhuman cough. This scream was so filled with agony that it almost did not sound like a noise a person should be able to make. Some of the other men were muttering and Clara had sat up on her bed, looking frightened.

“He’s gone mad,” she whispered.

Eve scrambled up and started forwards.

“Don’t!” Clara said, looking frightened. “Matron said not to if this happens. It might not be safe. We’re supposed to call her.”

Clara reached for the nearby telephone, but Eve had no intention of waiting. A couple of lamps were kept burning low during the night, but the ward was filled with shadows she had to stumble through to reach Max’s bed. He was sat up and the wild look in his eyes made her heart sink. He looked feral, dangerous. As soon as he saw her, he lunged forwards and gripped her arm, squeezing it so hard that she could feel the bruises forming beneath the skin. When he yanked her closer, she had the sudden image of him wrapping his hands around her throat and snapping her neck. In her quiet, protected life, Eve had never been physically assaulted before and was unprepared for how frightening it was to be grabbed, or how powerless and helpless and small it made her feel. The sudden panic of it. The dread.

She dragged in a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a hiss. “Lieutenant! Let me go!”

To her relief, he released her at once. The fury faded from his eyes as suddenly as it had appeared, and now he just looked confused and lost.

“You’re safe,” Eve said firmly. “It’s time to sleep.”

He stared at her without seeing her for a moment, then lay back down in his bed. One of the other soldiers—a captain called Donald—struggled over to her side.

“You all right, miss?” he asked. “Can I help?”

“Thank you, everything’s fine,” she whispered. “Please go back to bed.”

By the time Matron arrived on the ward, all was quiet once again.

“You shouldn’t have approached him,” she said sternly to Eve. “When they’re like that, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. They think they’re back in the trenches. He might have mistaken you for a German and killed you. It’s no good. He’ll have to be transferred tomorrow.”

The possibility made Eve feel dreadful, which made no sense at all, because if she was successful in changing what had happened to Bella, then Max Everly would die in this hotel anyway. It suddenly seemed to her like Max had been right in what he’d said—that sometimes life simply dealt you a hand that meant you were always going to fail, no matter what you did.

Chapter 43

The next day, Eve had a few hours’ sleep in her own room before she was summoned back to the ward. Max was just the same as before and Matron had the transfer paperwork in front of her. Eve thought of what Clara had said yesterday about china plates and Paris-Brest cakes, and Matron’s words from last night replayed inside her head.

They don’t know where they are…. They think they’re back in the trenches….

An idea occurred to her, and when she finally got a spare moment, she went downstairs. The huge kitchen was deserted, but she poked into the many cupboards and storage areas until, finally, at the back of one of the larders, she found an old tin of bully beef and a packet of stale biscuits. She put two slices of the beef and a couple of biscuits on a tin plate and carried it back to the ward. Max was sitting up in bed, staring at the wall. He had a chilling expression, as if he really were seeing things that none of the rest of them could detect at all.

She stood beside his bed and held the plate out to him. “Your rations, Lieutenant.”

He looked around at her and, in a dreamlike sort of way, took the plate. He stared down at it and Eve wondered whether he might throw it at the wall, but almost immediately, he began to urgently shovel the food into his mouth. Eve went back to the nurses’ station.

“He ate the food,” she said to Mrs. Jones. “Please let him stay. You said yourself that it’s better for him here.”

She could tell that Matron was unsure, but in the end she nodded. “We’ll see how we go,” she said, filing the paperwork away in a drawer.

One day slipped into two, which slipped into three, and soon a week had passed and then a fortnight. During her breaks, Eve frantically searched the hotel, but there wasn’t so much as a tentacle. The birdcage lift had not yet been installed and the Palm Bar had no mirrored panels or golden palm trees. In fact, it didn’t even have the same name. In this time period, it was called the Nook and featured mahogany walls and etched glass panels positioned around Victorian-style snugs. The bar was made of polished wood and set with green leather bar stools. Bottles of whiskey and cognac lined the shelves behind it. The blue curtain on the wall remained and Eve had already seen the Eavesdropper’s shabby shoes poking out from beneath it a couple of times. She always said hello to him, although he never said anything back.

The Gatsby Room was much as it had been in 1935. Eve knew that the officers had a farewell dinner there, so she wasn’t surprised at first, but then she looked again at the plaque on the door and frowned. Hadn’t The Great Gatsby been written in the twenties? Which meant that it was not yet published. She reflected that perhaps the room had been named for some other reason—maybe the architect or an investor of the hotel had been named Gatsby. Then again, maybe some other time-travelling guest had brought a copy of the novel back in time with them and then left it behind when they checked out….

The only person who might have been able to shed light on these things was Nikolas Roth and he remained hidden away in his suite on the sixth floor. It was strange to think of the artist up there, so close and yet so unreachable. There were dozens of questions Eve longed to ask him, but he never seemed to set foot on the lower floors. Once a week, though, Eve found a delivery of fresh flowers on her bedside table in Room 17, along with a card from Nikolas Roth that always read simply: With my compliments, N. Roth.

Eve asked Mrs. Jones whether she might be permitted to meet Nikolas Roth, but the matron shook her head. “He won’t see anyone,” she said. “I only met him once, very briefly, when I first arrived. It’s a condition of our using the hotel that he’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances.”

“But he sends me flowers every week,” Eve said.

Matron seemed startled by this news. “Be that as it may,” she said disapprovingly, “he won’t see you. He won’t see anyone. He even sent his wife and children away before the servicemen started to arrive. You’re here to tend to the men. There is no reason why you should cross paths with Mr. Roth.”

Eve hadn’t yet been up to the sixth floor. She’d been leaving it until last because she was worried that if she broke the one rule Nikolas Roth had specified, then there might be consequences and she might have to check out. She didn’t want to jeopardise her stay, but nor did she want to leave any stones unturned. And she was running out of options.

Eventually, she waited for an evening off and then went up to the top floor of the hotel. It looked much as it had in 1935, except for the fact that the door at the end of the corridor had a brass plaque that read The Roth Suite. When Eve paused outside, she could hear the faint strains of ragtime music playing from within. She recognised it, but it took her a moment to place it as the “Frog Legs Rag” that she’d heard from that painting inside the walls, what felt like a lifetime ago.

She raised her hand and knocked. The sound echoed down the empty corridor, but there was no response from inside. Light and shadow flickered through the small gap at the bottom, though, and Eve knew that someone was there, standing just on the other side of the door.

“I know you’re there,” she said, watching the shadow.

A man’s muffled voice came back to her. “You cannot be here, Miss Shaw. If you ever come near my door again, I will have you evicted from the hotel.”

She was this close to Nikolas Roth. He was right there on the other side of the door, the only person who might be able to answer her questions. Why is there an octopus hidden in the walls? Why were you so secretive about your paintings throughout your entire career? How do I win the scavenger hunt? Why am I here in the first place?

She slammed her hand against the door, suddenly angry. “But there are things I need to ask—”

“One more word,” Roth said quietly. There was something low and dangerous in his voice, something that was impossible to ignore. “One more word out of you, madam, and I promise you will never set foot in this hotel again.”

Eve shivered. She believed him, so she turned away and stalked back to the lower floors. And yet…in the days that followed, when she was outside, octopus-hunting around the grounds of the hotel, she had the strongest feeling that she was being watched. She could feel unseen eyes staring at her, and on a couple of occasions when she glanced back, she saw a curtain twitch on the sixth floor, as if someone had just stepped quickly back from the glass.

—

Up in the ward, Max was eating, but he still wasn’t speaking. Eve didn’t like how everyone else looked at him. In fact, she couldn’t stand it. No one spoke the word “coward” aloud, but there were judgements in the way that people looked at Max, and in the way they didn’t look at him, and the things they said, and didn’t say. There was a respectful tone in the nurses’ voices when they talked to the other POWs, but they spoke to Max like he was a child, and that made something furious stir in Eve.

Much of the time Max did nothing at all, just stared that dreadful stare, but after a couple of weeks, Eve noticed him sometimes watching her—looking at her and actually seeing her as she moved about the ward. And she thought that had to be a good sign, that he was seeing what was in front of him now rather than looking at whatever horror he’d left back there, in France.

Reporting for duty on the ward had been a nuisance to begin with, but after a while Eve realised she enjoyed her time there and felt at home with the wounded servicemen, experienced a greater sense of belonging with them than she’d ever felt with any other group of people. And before long, the men started to speak of seeing a war horse in the steam baths—a grey horse that returned lost items.

Almost three weeks after Eve had arrived in 1918, Max spoke to her for the first time. She was bringing around cups of coffee one morning when he held a letter up and said, “Would you post this for me, miss?”

It was strange hearing his voice after so many weeks, but Eve simply took the letter. “Of course. I’d be glad to.”

She was pleased that he’d spoken to her, but when she told Matron about it and showed her the envelope later, the other woman shook her head.

“That’s addressed to his mother,” she said.

“Well, yes. I suppose he wants to tell her where he is now and that—”

“She’s dead,” Matron cut her off. “Both his parents are. They caught Spanish flu, back in London.”

“Oh.” Eve looked at the envelope in her hand and the letter it contained that would never be read.

“He’s been informed,” Matron said. “His aunt wrote to him the first week he was here. I saw the letter when I was tidying away his things. I suppose he can’t take it in at the moment.”

“It’s been really bad in England,” Clara put in. “The flu pandemic. One of the other men told me that his sister wrote to say that they can’t build coffins fast enough for everyone. The dead bodies just have to lie there. In the houses.”

Eve looked over at Max, who was staring at the wall again.

“I could bring a gramophone up,” she said. “I saw one downstairs. The men have nothing to do all day and it might help if they could listen to some music—”

Matron was shaking her head. “We can’t move anything without Mr. Roth’s permission.”

“Well, let’s get his permission, then,” Eve said. “Why would he mind anyway? He’s shut away being mysterious on the sixth floor.”

“I’ve already told you that we’re not to disturb Mr. Roth,” Matron said sternly. “We’re not to go up to the sixth floor under any circumstances. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

Eve let the conversation drop, but a couple of hours later she went down to the music room and got the gramophone, lugging it all the way up the stairs, along with a box of records. Matron was furious.

“If you ever defy one of my instructions again, I will put in a request for you to be moved to a different hotel,” Matron said. “You’ll be gone by the morning.”

But the men were so delighted by the gramophone’s presence that there was no talk of taking it back downstairs. Max didn’t say anything about the music, but he kept looking over at the gramophone and focusing on it instead of doing that chilling stare into the past.

The next day, when Eve brought him his lunch, he looked up at her in a curious sort of way and said, “Are you real?”

For a moment, she was back in the Palm Bar, surrounded by black velvet and golden palm trees, a chilled Aviation in her hand.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Is your name really Eve Shaw?” he pressed on.

She nodded.

He continued to stare at her as if she was a puzzle. “But are you…can you be the same person who sent those parcels to me out at the front?”

Eve paused. Had she done this? Max hadn’t said anything about parcels back in 1935. Perhaps he was confused and thinking of some other girl. Perhaps he had a sweetheart back home in England—one of those many platinum blondes. She was about to tell him it hadn’t been her when he said, “It was you, wasn’t it? I’m glad I get to thank you in person.” His eyes flicked towards the gramophone. “The records you sent. They meant a lot to my friend. Thomas.”

His hand gave a sudden convulsive twitch then, and he stopped speaking abruptly.

I shot him in the head….

His words from 1935 echoed back to her.

There’s no forgiveness for that, no coming back from it….

Our nightmares will never go away….

“I’m glad about the records,” Eve said quietly. “And so sorry about your friend.”

Max didn’t reply. He didn’t say another word for the rest of the day, but the twitches and tremors were bad. The next morning Eve found him out on the balcony. It was the first time he’d agreed to go outside, and she could tell that he was looking at the mountains and actually seeing them.

I ought to go now, Eve thought. Back to 1935. This isn’t helping me with the scavenger hunt. So why am I still here?

Surely if she was going to find any clocks or octopuses in 1918, then she would have done so by now. But she couldn’t shake the conviction that the key to Room 17 had come to her for a reason. She tried not to think about the possibility that it was to save Max on the rooftop, like he’d said. This wasn’t about him. It was about the scavenger hunt. Maybe the final octopus hiding here in the past was one like Cleo, only appearing in certain circumstances. If she just stuck it out long enough, then perhaps she would find it. But she couldn’t deny that she looked forward to seeing Max each day. She looked forward to it so much that she was not quite ready, deep down, to give it up.

“Thank you, miss.” He took the pretzel from her.

“Call me Eve, if you like.”

“If you’ll call me Max.” He held out another letter addressed to his mother. “Would you mind posting this?”

“Of course.”

She took the letter and tucked it into her pocket. She wondered when and how the subject of Max’s parents should be broached with him again, but then he surprised her by saying, “I know they’re dead. Everyone thinks I don’t, but I do. My head isn’t quite that cracked.”

“Then…why the letters?”

“I can’t explain. I don’t know why I keep writing to them.” He looked down at the pretzel. “You know, we got one piece of bread a day in Germany. It was about half the size of the palm of your hand. We used to boil snails and grind them up with nettles into a spread to bulk it out. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to food like this.”

For the next week, Eve walked around the hotel at different hours of the day. She tried midnight, 3 a.m., sunrise, 9 p.m., just in case a clock or octopus only appeared at a certain hour; just in case she stumbled across the Sugar Room. Occasionally, when she was walking around the hotel, she thought she caught the faintest scent of freshly baked cakes, creamy chocolate, and roasting coffee. This happened more often in the middle of the night, but there was never any sign of a patisserie. Despite Nikolas Roth’s instructions, Eve tried returning to the corridor of floor six, in case that tentacle should appear to pull her through the wall again. She even laid her hands flat against the wallpaper, reaching for the octopus with her mind, begging it to come for her, but there was no sign of it. She wandered the steam baths, the tread of her heels echoing over the tiles, but there was no octopus and no trench horse. There was, perhaps, nothing here in 1918 for her at all.

Finally, Eve stood in the empty frigidarium at midnight and put her hand in the pocket of her nurse’s dress, looking for the fumsup that was no longer there. Instead, her fingers stroked the cold metal of the key to Room 17. There had to be something here. Something that she was missing. Perhaps she should try the balconies. She’d wandered the corridors and rooms at night over and over again, but she hadn’t been out to the balconies or the roof after dark. It would be foolish to go back to 1935 before making sure there were no stones unturned. It was, she told herself, the only reason she was staying. It had nothing whatever to do with Max.

Chapter 44

For a little while, Max wrote a letter to his parents every day. And then, abruptly, the letters stopped. The next time Eve saw him scribbling on the balcony, she realised he wasn’t writing a letter at all. He was writing music. The notes sprawled out across the paper and even onto the envelopes. He saw her looking and said, “Can you read music, Eve?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He looked back down at his work. “It’s so quiet in the mountains, I can hear it again, inside my head.”

Eve wondered which piece he was working on and how many times she might have listened to it and been comforted by it.

“I was going to be a musician, you know,” he added. “Before the war.”

Eve was tidying some blankets into a pile. “The war will be over one day.”

“Will it? It feels like it will continue until everyone’s dead.”

Max was scratching something on his paper and when she glanced down, she saw that he’d just given his song a title: “Afternight.” She stopped what she was doing with the blankets. She knew that song. Oh, she knew it well. It was soft and mournful, haunting, but somehow hopeful too. She must have listened to it thousands of times. It was one of the hands—the ones that came to hold on to her when she was lost in the dark.

Max glanced up then and frowned at the expression on her face. “Something wrong?”

She shook her head. “No. I was just thinking it must be wonderful. To hear music inside your head like that.”

“It’s everything. When I’m composing, I’m myself again. The real me, I mean. Not that other chap.”

“I draw,” Eve found herself saying. “To make sense of my thoughts. The ones I can’t put into words. The darkness.”

She fell silent, embarrassed at revealing a little bit more than she’d intended.

“Yes,” Max said quietly. “That’s it. Some things just…can’t be said out loud. Put all the devils into music instead, that’s the best place for them.” He looked back at her. “What do you like to draw?”

“Octopuses.”

“Why octopuses?”

She paused. “I’m not sure. I think they’re strange and beautiful. But also…” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think grief is a bit like an octopus. That sprawl of tentacles that reaches into every corner of your life and you can’t beat it or banish it, so you have to…find a way to make it your own somehow. A part of you that you can live with. A friend. And I like octopuses.”

Max nodded and flashed her a sudden smile—the first time he’d done so since he’d arrived at the hotel. It was there and gone in a moment, but it made him appear younger and boyish. Sometimes looking at Max felt to Eve like staring at an optical illusion. She could see the young man, but she could also see the thirty-six-year-old Max she’d known in 1935, as well as the elderly man from 2016.

She left him to it. In the weeks and months that followed, she concentrated her scavenger hunt search on the exterior of the hotel—the balconies and verandas—checking them at different times of the day and night. The weather turned frozen and the hotel was bitterly cold. Hardly any of the rooms were heated thanks to fuel restrictions. The ward itself was one of the few rooms in the hotel that was warm, but sleep there wasn’t restful. Max often woke from night terrors, screaming and sweating. He hadn’t grabbed Eve since that first occasion, but it would take time for him to realise where he was and even longer for the shaking to stop. The other nurses were all scared of him when he was like that, so Eve was always the one who sat at his bedside and held his hand for hours until he finally fell asleep.

And then, one night after the armistice was announced, she was off duty, and it was late, and she was checking the roof. It was the last place left to look. When the door opened and a man walked out, she thought it must be Nikolas Roth to begin with, but then she saw it was Max, wearing only his pyjamas and the dazed expression of a sleepwalker. He didn’t notice she was there until she climbed up onto the wall beside him.

Eve had hoped that Max had exaggerated when he’d told her about this night in 1935. That maybe it didn’t really matter whether she was there on the roof or not. But when she saw the look in his eyes and heard the way he talked and the things he said, she knew. She knew that he would do it. And part of her wondered why she was allowing herself to care anyway, because she was still committed—fully and completely—to finding that writing paper and rewriting the past. What would be the point of saving someone now only for them to die later?

And yet.

Maybe she wouldn’t win the scavenger hunt. Maybe there was no writing paper. Maybe her plan wouldn’t work, even if there was. Maybe there was no hunt or prize at all; perhaps this was only a game that Nikolas and Anna Roth were playing. There were many, many unknowns, but there was nothing unknown about Max or the current situation, so she did what anyone would have done and she climbed up onto the wall to try to stop him. When he slipped on the wall and tried to let go of her hand, there was a little snap inside Eve’s head. Or was it a click? Perhaps it was a tick. Or a tock. Time stopped.

And then she saw him, the man stood below in the grounds, dressed in a long, dark coat.

The POWs were not permitted to leave the hotel after dark. A reminder that they were, in fact, still very much prisoners. And so, this could surely only be one person—Nikolas Roth. Eve felt a flicker of relief. He would do something—call for help, or try to get up onto the roof, or, well, she didn’t know what, but he would try to help in whatever way he could.

Yet he didn’t. He only stood there, painted silver by the moonlight, watching in unnaturally still silence.

We always got the impression that he didn’t much care for the servicemen, Max had said, that he would have preferred it if we’d never come to his hotel at all….

No one was going to help. It was up to Eve alone. Her gaze locked with Max’s and she thought, No. You’re not leaving like this.

And she didn’t care, in that moment, about Bella, or the writing paper, or the scavenger hunt. She didn’t care about anything at all except saving Max Everly’s life. The tentacles ripped out into the night, and she yelled as they tore through her skin, wrapping around Max and helping her to pull them both back onto the roof.

When they stood up to go a few minutes later, she glanced over the edge of the wall, but Roth had vanished. Eve led Max downstairs to the bathroom. She could feel a white-hot flame of anger burning inside her as she thought of Roth, standing there watching, doing nothing to help. As soon as Max was back on the ward, she would return to the Roth Suite and demand an answer, whether it was forbidden or not. But as she hurried down the stairs with a set of spare clothes for Max, she met Roth coming up. They noticed each other at the same instant and froze—Eve on the landing and Roth near the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, there was no sound at all but for the hissing of the gas lamps. The light wasn’t enough to see Roth clearly, but Eve noticed he was still wearing his coat and that his dark hair was streaked with grey. His face was angled away from her, but she could tell he was tall, and probably somewhere in his midfifties.

“Mr. Roth,” she said.

“Miss Shaw. I didn’t expect to see you here. Ought you not to be on the ward?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Her voice came out harsh with anger. “You saw what happened on the roof. Why didn’t you help?”

He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “What would you have had me do? Besides, it looked as if you had the situation well in hand.”

Eve wondered whether he had seen her tentacles, but if he had, then surely he would say something? She realised they were on the same staircase from the black-and-white photograph of the servicemen lined up in their hospital blues. The one with that dark figure in the corner that Max had said must have been Nikolas Roth.

He never spoke to any of us, but we were aware of him lurking in the shadows sometimes….

“The servicemen all think that you dislike them,” she told him. “That you don’t want them here.”

She wondered if he might deny it, but after a pause he simply said, “Of course I don’t want them here.”

“Then why offer your hotel at all?”

“Sometimes we are forced by circumstance.”

Eve considered asking why he’d been wandering the grounds in the middle of the night, but she doubted she’d get much of an answer and it was his property, after all, to wander about as he liked. Unlike the internees, he wasn’t a captive.

“The hotel will close, you know,” she said, relishing the spite of the words. “It will close in 1935, never to reopen.”

Roth tilted his head slightly. “You’re mistaken, Miss Shaw. There’s an old legend that the White Octopus will close its doors for good on the day snow falls from the ceiling and other lives are glimpsed within the mirrors, but the truth is this hotel will go on forever.” He nodded at the laundered hospital blues in her hands. “Isn’t there some shivering fellow waiting somewhere for those?”

Eve realised that, without her coat, she was freezing in the unheated stairwell too. Scowling, she began to walk down the stairs. Roth retreated into the shadows of the landing to make space for her to pass. She could barely make out the glimmer of his eyes through the dark.

“Might I say,” he spoke quietly, “that I admire your dedication to your duties very much. The internees are lucky to have you.”

Eve was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Whatever your private feelings, you ought to have had the courtesy to welcome the men to your hotel. They’ve experienced things you cannot imagine.”

“I daresay.”

“Don’t send any more flowers to my room,” Eve said. “I want nothing from you.”

“As you wish, madam.”

Eve left him behind and quickly walked down the corridor to the bathroom, feeling guilty for the time she’d been gone. She passed the clothes through the bathroom door to Max and once he was settled back on the ward, she returned to Room 17, took the key from her pocket, and stared at it for the longest time. She simply did not know what to do.

She could almost feel Bella’s little ghost tugging insistently on her hand, but there was Max holding on to the other hand, until it began to feel as if they might rip her in half between them. The octopus burned as it travelled up to her collarbone and trailed its tentacles gently over her neck and shoulders. Eve didn’t know what she ought to do. So, for perhaps the first time in her life, she did what she wanted to do. She put the key away and she stayed in 1918. Not forever. But just for now. To be close to Max. To enjoy whatever last moments they might be able to spend together.

Chapter 45

The next morning, Eve was surprised to find a box of ice skates had been sent up to the ward for the men, with “Mr. Roth’s compliments.” It seemed a feeble way to make up for his bizarre behaviour the night before, but the men who were fit enough to use the skates were delighted.

Max refused to go, at first, but Eve bullied him outside with the others. There was a time to sit quietly alone and be sad—she knew that herself all too well—but there were also occasions where you needed sunshine and fresh air and mountains. After half an hour on the ice, Max was almost smiling. The POWs soon insisted Eve join them, but she’d never skated before and was hopeless at it.

“Here,” Max said at last, after the tenth time she’d fallen. “Take my hand.”

Eve let him haul her upright, but he didn’t let go as she’d expected. With his arm to steady her, she managed to skate slowly over the lake. They were surrounded by other men, but in some way, it felt as if they were the only people there. She was glad to have an excuse to hold Max’s hand, to feel the warmth of his touch through their gloves. She felt such utter joy at the sight of him smiling. Things felt different between them after last night. How could they not? It was a delight to do something normal. To not think of dark things for a while. To pretend to be ordinary people.

But soon enough, it was time to return inside for lunch, and Eve reluctantly let him go. They trudged back to the hotel and were almost at the front doors when Max lightly touched the sleeve of her coat. They were so close to each other, shoulder to shoulder in the snow, and for a bright second Eve thought he was going to kiss her. But then he just nodded down to the skates they were each carrying and said gruffly, “Thanks. For this morning and…you know. For last night.”

“Of course,” Eve said softly.

“Stop loitering out there!” Matron called through the open doors to them. “Lunch is served.”

Later that night, Max woke from nightmares sweating and shaking, so Eve took him down to the lobby piano. At first, he just stared at it. They were close enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm and leg pressing against her, could hear the raggedness of his breathing.

“There was this village in France,” he said quietly. “It had been occupied by the Germans and we were going through these empty, abandoned houses. One of them had a piano in the front room. Our captain was a pianist and he went straight over to it. I was annoyed that he’d spotted it first, but the Germans had rigged it. As soon as he opened the lid, the bomb went off, killing him and the man stood next to him.”

Eve was silent. What could she say to such a revelation? Nothing would bring the men back or change what had happened.

“It’s bad enough dying in battle,” Max went on. “But dying because you wanted to play music just seems so…so…”

He trailed off. He’d still made no move to open the piano lid and Eve wondered whether she should do it, but it seemed like something Max ought to do himself. You couldn’t force someone into recovering. You couldn’t rush them into feeling better. She reasoned that even if they sat on this stool, staring at the piano, for an hour, at least it was something, it was a start. But after another few minutes, Max opened the lid.

Eve knew that the piano in the White Octopus Hotel wasn’t rigged with explosives and yet she still thought she could hear the distant BOOM! of that other bomb, in that other country, ending two men’s lives so pointlessly. To get rid of the sound from within her own head, she reached out and pressed down on middle C. The clear, perfect note rang through the room, banishing the violent echoes from that other world. It was a relief when Max pressed the key a few times himself and then finally began to play.

The lobby was filled with music all night and they came back to the piano often after that, sometimes during the day and sometimes after dark when he couldn’t sleep. And something started to shift and change between them.

Eve told herself it was friendship, that’s all. It wasn’t love; it definitely, absolutely was not love. Perhaps it was a little bit of lust, though.

One week after that night on the rooftop, Max went to kiss her on the cheek as they were saying good night, but Eve moved her head at the same time, and he planted it on her lips instead. It was light and feather-soft, yet Eve felt her entire body responding with a yearning completely unlike anything she’d ever felt before. They broke apart awkwardly and soon returned to the ward, but Eve felt the echo of that kiss all night. She felt it alone in her bed later, and the next day when they held hands to skate on the lake, and she knew she was entering dangerous territory, that she couldn’t stay here, in a time where she didn’t belong. Sooner or later, it would have to end. She would have to face up to her commitments and her obligations. Face up to Bella.

She saw her sister, sometimes, when she was in the lobby with Max. The little girl sat beneath the piano, listening to the music. Eve never looked properly, of course she didn’t, she wasn’t that foolish, but she often saw her sister’s shiny party shoes poking out from beneath the instrument, saw her chubby legs and the ruffles of that party dress.

I haven’t forgotten you, Eve said to her inside her head. I know what needs to be done. And I will do it. I will. I’ll go back to 1935 and I’ll hunt down those last clocks and the final octopus, and I’ll win the scavenger hunt and get the writing paper and bring you back. I’ll forsake the man sitting next to me. I haven’t forgotten. I’m just…listening to the music. Just for a little while, before I have to go.

December arrived and Eve continued to hold Max’s hand when they skated together, even though her own technique had improved and she didn’t really need his help anymore—a fact they were both well aware of. But they held hands anyway, and this made it easier to talk—of music, and home, and life, and the war. Eve talked to Max like she’d never before spoken to anyone, looked forward to those excursions onto the frozen lake with an intensity that was truly alarming to her.

“What will you do?” Max asked one morning. “Now that the war’s over?”

“I suppose I’ll have to go back to my normal life.”

“Do you think…That is, might you consider…” He trailed off, then abruptly shook his head. “Never mind.”

And Eve didn’t push him, because she couldn’t bear to hear what he might have been about to say. And before long, the Swiss nurses all went back to their homes and arrangements were made for the POWs to return to England. Eve tried to tell herself it was a relief. She didn’t want to feel the things she was feeling when she looked at Max. She didn’t want her skin to tingle when she was close to him. She didn’t want any of it. Because when she went back to 1935, there would still be Bella, waiting for Eve to save her. And Eve would do it—no matter what it cost, or who it hurt, or what had to be given up. She would do what she had come here to do.

There was going to be a farewell dinner for all the men later that evening in the Gatsby Room and Eve knew it was time for her to leave as well. In the meantime, Matron had suggested that the men might like to partake of the healing qualities of the mineral pools in the steam baths one final time.

“You won’t find water like that back home,” she pointed out.

There wasn’t much else to do, so they all went along with her idea happily enough. All except for Max, who wanted to use the lobby piano to put the finishing touches to a piece he’d been trying to compose for the last month. It was his birthday today, although he hadn’t told anyone. Eve only knew because she’d been helping Matron to organise some of the ward paperwork earlier in the week. She wanted to give him something and had spent the past few evenings working on a sketch of an octopus sprawled atop a piano. It was folded in her pocket, beside the hotel keys, but there hadn’t been the right moment to give it to him yet.

That afternoon, she accompanied the men down to the steam baths and made sure they all had towels and drinking water before she returned to the hotel. After several hours, with dinner about to be served in the Gatsby Room, Eve went up to the ward to see if the men had returned, but only found Matron busy arguing with Max about his uniform. It had already been cleaned and pressed once, but Max was insisting it be done again.

“There are bloodstains on the collar,” he said. “I can see them plain as day.”

“I can’t see a stain anywhere,” Matron replied.

“I won’t wear it,” Max insisted. “Not in that state.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but there simply isn’t time to have it washed again before you leave.”

Eve grabbed her coat and slipped outside, walking through the snow to the steam baths. She had a sense of unease, suddenly, as if she might enter the baths only to find the men gone, vanished, their towels and water lying untouched, like they’d never been there at all. But when she opened the door, she met them in the act of coming out.

“There you are,” she said, relieved. “Look, you’d better get ready for dinner quickly, or else Matron will be…” She trailed off at the look on their faces. “What’s happened?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

The nearest man, Donald, shook his head. “Nothing’s wrong, miss. It’s only that we’ve just…well, we’ve had a strange experience.”

Eve looked past him towards the interior of the steam baths. The entrance hall appeared just as it always did, but the men all wore dazzled looks, as if something indescribable had taken place.

“There was music,” Donald went on. “It was…” He glanced back at the others, but they seemed at a loss as to how they should describe it. Donald shook his head. “I don’t know how to tell you what it was. It’s stopped now, but we couldn’t leave while it was playing because it was…it was…”

“It was the most beautiful music in the world,” one of the other men said. “The most beautiful music that’s ever been written or that ever will be written. That’s what it was.”

The others nodded.

“Honest to God, miss,” another soldier said. “I felt as if it washed my soul clean.”

The music box, Eve thought. It’s in there somewhere.

“Did you see where it came from?” she asked.

Donald shook his head. “No. But we were in the frigidarium when we heard it, and I’ll never forget it; never.” He glanced at the men beside him. “I actually feel…better. Like it might be all right. Once I get back home.”

The others nodded their agreement. “You should go in, miss,” one of the soldiers said. “In case it starts again.”

“I’ll just check that everything’s in order,” she replied.

The men traipsed off through the snow back towards the hotel and Eve stepped into the steam baths alone. As soon as she entered the frigidarium, she was struck by the remarkable beauty of the place. The only sound was the hiss of warm air through the pipes and the drip of water landing on the terrazzo floor somewhere nearby. She went into the tepidarium and then on to the caldarium, the laconicum, and the pools. She even checked the changing rooms, but the rows of wooden cubicles all stood empty, and the place was silent. Finally, she returned to the welcome coolness of the frigidarium and was about to head towards the exit when she suddenly heard the music and couldn’t breathe.

It was the most beautiful music in the world. There was no doubt whatsoever about that. But “beautiful” wasn’t a big enough word; it was far more than that. It was a candle shining brightly in the dark. It was clean sheets and a comfortable mattress after sleeping on beds made from rabbit wire. It was taking that first, wobbly step out of the darkness—a promise that life would be worth living. It was the joy of being seen and understood after years of invisibility. It was getting better, and being alive, and being happy again after heartbreak. It was being loved completely for who you were, without conditions or expectations.

Eve felt tears in her eyes as she turned around, even though she never cried, never. There on the step beneath the clock arch was a miniature grand piano. It was small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and made of mirrors. On top of this sprawled an octopus, pearly white but for the dark tip of a single tentacle. Surely this was the last octopus for the scavenger hunt—the one she had come all this way to find? There was a small key at the side where the music box was wound. Eve walked over to it, crouched down for a better look, and pulled the sketch she’d made for Max from her pocket. The music box was the same as her drawing. The only difference was that the music box had words engraved on the lid:

For Eve,

The other half of my soul.

All my love, always,

Max

There was a gentle click as the box wound down and stopped. Silence filled the room once more and Eve took a shuddering breath.

Honest to God, miss, the soldier had said. I felt as if it washed my soul clean….

He was right. That was how it felt—like the healing moment that followed tears. The air felt purer, easier to breathe. And Eve had the sudden sense that, impossibly, it would all be okay. A single tear spilled down her cheek and she wiped it away, wondering how many years it must have been since she had last done so.

“Eve?”

Quickly, she rose to her feet and turned around. Max stood in the entrance to the frigidarium. He’d clearly lost his battle with Matron because he was wearing his uniform. It was the first time she’d seen him in it since his arrival at the train station. She was pleased to see that it fitted him better now that he wasn’t so thin. It made him look older, too—much older than his twenty years.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked, walking over. “The others have all gone in to dinner.”

“There’s a music box—” Eve began, but when she looked down, it had gone. “It was here, it…It was playing the most beautiful music in the world.”

Max came to her side, shaking his head. “There’s no such thing. It doesn’t exist. It cannot.”

“It does. I just heard it.”

He looked at her closely. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been…crying.”

She tried to gather herself, but it was difficult to think clearly through the echoes of that music. And the engraved words glowed inside her mind as well. She didn’t know how to explain it. All she knew was that she didn’t love Max, she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t. They were friends, that’s all, and it would hurt to say goodbye, but she would do it, she would leave, and she would win the scavenger hunt, because the gate was creaking and creaking inside her head, and Bella was giggling as she ran out into the road, and it couldn’t be allowed to happen again. She thought of the night up on the roof, and how it would have played out if she hadn’t been there, and she felt sick to her soul and couldn’t look Max in the eye.

“I’m fine,” she whispered. “Sorry. It just…It’s a strange day.”

“Yes.” He glanced down at the sketch in her hands. “What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s, um…It’s for you, actually. I know you were trying to keep it a secret, but everyone should get something on their birthday.”

“Birthday?” he replied, looking genuinely surprised. “Oh. Yes, I suppose it is. Huh. I never thought I’d make twenty. Can I see it then?”

He held out his hand and Eve passed it to him, suddenly embarrassed. What use was a scrawled picture on a piece of paper? It couldn’t make up for what she planned to do. Or, more important, not do. Max stared down at the drawing for what felt like a long time before he finally looked back at her.

“This is . . ,” he said, a slight catch in his voice. “Thank you. I will treasure it always. Listen, I’m glad to find you here. I was hoping to have the chance to say goodbye properly. And I wanted to thank you. For…for all that you’ve done for me. You’ve been…a tremendous friend.”

I have not, Eve thought. I am the very worst type of friend there is. The worst type of person.

“I owe you a debt,” Max went on. “Such a large debt, and I suppose I shall never manage to repay it.”

“You owe me nothing,” Eve said quietly.

Perhaps I won’t win, she thought again with a fierce flare of hope. Perhaps I won’t win the hunt, will never find those last clocks or octopus. Yet, she couldn’t shake the conviction that, one way or another, she would win. Because Eve was the type of person who achieved the thing she set her mind on, no matter how difficult or impossible it might seem. And, besides, she would lose Max either way. When she checked out, even her memories of him would vanish. The good times don’t last. And some friendships can’t be forever.

Very carefully, Max folded the drawing and put it in his pocket. “Well,” he said. “We should go in to dinner.”

“We should,” Eve replied.

But they didn’t move. And they didn’t move. The air between them became charged with something tingling and electric. The frigidarium was warm compared to the hotel and she was starting to sweat beneath her uniform. Max must have been roasting in his and she found herself staring at the buttons of his jacket. They’d been tarnished at some point by exposure to poisonous gas and she wished she could reach out and undo them, one by one, that she could run her fingers along the bare skin of his chest.

“Max,” she began, then broke off because she was sure he must hear the longing in her voice.

Don’t go.

Stay here.

With me.

The words rang so loudly inside her head that perhaps he heard them too. Eve wasn’t sure who stepped forwards first. All she knew was that Max’s arms were around her, his hands pressing against the small of her back, her fingers clutching his collar, and then his lips were on hers and there was the kiss, at last. And for once, there were no apples, or balloons, or rabbits. There was just Max Everly, setting her on fire.

They staggered to the tepidarium like drunks and locked the door of the chamber behind them, sweat running down them as they undressed. Eve didn’t have any birth control and she knew she was taking a risk—one she’d vowed she would never, ever take. But she couldn’t bring herself to make them stop, not when this was their one and only chance. There were no parts of her body she wanted to cover—not even the octopus. And the warmth of Max’s hands on her skin was the single most blissful feeling she’d ever experienced. Here, at last, was where she was supposed to be, with the person she was supposed to love.

Afterwards, as they lay together on one of the benches, Max’s fingers gently squeezed hers. “I love you,” he said.

And I’m supposed to love you back, Eve thought. But I can’t.

Something soft brushed against her ankle and she knew, even before she looked, that it would be a rabbit. She jerked away from Max, scrambling off the bench. There it was—a sleek, white rabbit hopping innocently about at the end of the bench, its little nose twitching, and Eve couldn’t prevent a groan. No matter how far she went, she would never be free of Bella and what she had done.

“Eve?” Max scrambled to his feet too, wrapping a towel around his waist. “What’s wrong?”

She took the towel he passed her, and beyond him she could see paint peeling from the walls, and the tiles crumbling, and the furniture decaying. She heard the clip-clop of hooves and thought it might be the horse, but then the wind rattled through the broken windows and peering in through the jagged shards were the calm, wise eyes of the ibex. An old, old man was standing there too, leaning on a walking stick and holding out a white octopus.

Come back to the hotel….

“Come back to the hotel.”

Eve jumped. Someone was knocking on the door. The tepidarium had returned to its old splendour and Max was twenty years old again, but they were no longer alone. When she unlocked the door, Eve found a girl on the other side—somewhere between a child and a woman, perhaps sixteen, much younger than when Eve had last seen her in 1935, but she still recognised Anna Roth at once. Her black hair was tied back in two plaits, and she wore a winter coat with sturdy boots. The look in her eyes as she gazed at them was hard to place. Was it hostility? Curiosity? Shock?

She hates me, Eve thought bleakly. I will never be free of her.

“Come back to the hotel,” Anna said again, speaking quietly but firmly, looking straight at Eve. “My father wants to see you.”

Eve took a deep breath. “All right. I just need to get dressed.”

Max hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll see you in the Gatsby Room.” He picked up his clothes and went out the door in the direction of the men’s changing rooms. The rabbit had gone, as though it had never been there at all.

“I’ll wait for you in the frigidarium,” Anna said, turning on her heel.

Eve gathered up her clothes, her skin still tingling. When she’d showered and dressed, she joined Anna in the Wellness Area.

“Why does Nikolas Roth want to see me?” she asked.

The girl lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug.

“Matron told me that you’d gone away with your siblings and mother,” Eve said.

“We came back,” Anna replied.

The cold outside was an icy shock after the warmth of the frigidarium and Eve shivered. The darkness had deepened while she’d been in the steam baths and there was something unreal about the snow that covered everything. Eve could almost believe it wasn’t snow at all, but paint used to create a certain effect, a stage set for a scene.

The hotel itself was surreal too, sprawled before them in the moonlight. Almost all of its windows were dark except for a couple of lights upstairs and one on the ground floor that Eve recognised as the Gatsby Room. She could see the silhouettes of the servicemen walking about beyond the window, could hear the echo of their conversation and laughter. For a wild moment, she wondered whether any of this was real at all or only a performance for some unknown audience. She heard the creak of that gate inside her head again, heard a balloon popping somewhere close.

“Wait.” She put out a hand and touched Anna’s arm. The girl stopped at once but continued to look at the hotel rather than at Eve. “I have to know,” Eve went on, her voice shaking slightly. “Please, tell me the truth. Are you my Annabella?”

For a moment, the girl remained silent, and Eve began to think she might say nothing at all. But then she glanced at Eve and their eyes met just briefly. “Yes.”

The whisper fell soft as a snowflake between them, before the surroundings settled back into silence. It was the answer Eve had been expecting—the answer she knew, somehow, to be the truth—and yet it still hit her like a slap, and made it difficult to draw in breath, difficult to think. She couldn’t hear anything over the creak of the gate swinging back and forth inside her head. Anna and Eve stared at each other in the cool blue haze of the moonlight reflecting on the snow and the moment stretched impossibly on and on, as if they weren’t real women at all, but stone statues facing each other across the frozen grounds for all eternity. The arrival of new snowfall broke the spell and they continued into the hotel, the snow compacting beneath their boots and trailing across the floor of the lobby. They rode the lift in silence. To Eve’s surprise, Anna pressed the button for the third floor.

“Isn’t Nikolas Roth on the sixth floor?” she asked.

Anna shook her head. The lift stopped, the grille slid back, and a long freezing corridor lined with locked doors stretched out in front of them.

“This way.” Anna set off down the corridor, only to stop in front of Room 17.

“But that’s my room,” Eve said. Surely Nikolas Roth couldn’t be in there? She turned back to Anna. “What is this all really about? Please tell me.”

Anna shook her head and pointed to the door, so Eve took the key from her pocket. When she stepped inside, the room was just as she’d left it.

“There’s no one here,” she began, turning back towards Anna. But the girl had already slammed the door closed and she heard the click of the lock behind her. Inexplicably, the key was shoved beneath the door to her a moment later.

“What are you doing?” Eve called.

She felt a sudden chill in her blood and wondered whether Max had been right, after all. Perhaps something nefarious did happen to her at the hotel. Perhaps there was a reason that everyone lied about knowing her. Anna didn’t reply, and when Eve looked through the peephole, she saw that the girl had gone, and the corridor was empty. She picked up the key and turned back into the room and that was when she saw that it was not as she had left it, after all. While she’d been gone, someone had changed all the artwork on the walls.

From every angle, William-Adolphe Bouguereau paintings surrounded her, all depicting the same subject matter—rosy-cheeked, angelic little girls smiling sweetly from their frames, plump hands full of ripe apples. The paint seemed to morph before her eyes until it was Bella’s face peering out from every one. There hadn’t been any flowers in her room since that night she’d met Roth on the staircase, but now she saw fresh blooms on her dressing table and the card propped up beside them:

Dear Miss Shaw,

We hope you had a pleasant stay at the White Octopus. Please remember to take everything with you when you check out.

Kind regards,

N. Roth

Eve had always intended to leave today, yet now she hesitated. Perhaps she could just go and say a proper goodbye to Max first? Otherwise he’d be left with the impression that he’d done something to upset her, that she regretted what had taken place between them…. With a sudden flare of dread, she remembered what he’d said to her back in 1935.

There was a…a misunderstanding between us….

Friends hurt each other sometimes….

Behind her, Eve suddenly heard the distinctive thump of an apple hitting the floor and rolling across the room. She turned around and saw more apples swelling up out of the canvas before tumbling right out of the painting.

Thud, thud, thud.

There must have been a dozen paintings in the room and the apples were falling even faster than they had before. Already, the floor was half covered with them, and Eve had to kick them aside to reach the door. She slid the key into the lock, but it had jammed somehow and wouldn’t turn clockwise.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

Sweat prickled along her hairline as apples tumbled down behind her. She could feel them rolling into her feet and bumping up against her calves. She threw her shoulder against the door, but these were solid frames, and it didn’t move an inch. The apples were against her thighs now and she had the sudden clear conviction that if she didn’t check out now, right now, then she would die here in this room, crushed beneath the weight of thousands of apples. She would not be able to say goodbye to Max or make any attempt to explain what had happened in the frigidarium but perhaps that was for the best because, after all, what could she say? What could she possibly say that would make any sense? She’d already stayed here far longer than she should. It was time to go.

She turned the key anticlockwise.

There was a soft click.

And the lock slid open.

Chapter 46

Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935

The corridor came into focus around her, and she could tell from the décor that she was in 1935 again. A few apples had rolled out of the doorway with her, but something strange had happened to them. At first Eve thought it must be the time-travel headache and the camera flashes that were still popping behind her eyes, but no. The apples were transformed. She recalled Alfie’s words from when she first arrived.

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, Gâteaux 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.

Chapter 47

Max stared at Eve, taking in her nurse’s uniform. “Is this…is this 1918?” he asked hoarsely.

“It’s 1935, sir,” Luca replied.

“Ah. Did you find them back there then?” Max asked quietly. “The last clocks? The octopus?”

She shook her head. “No clocks. I thought I found the octopus, but the scavenger card won’t let me add it. The words keep disappearing. How long have I been gone?”

He glanced at his watch. “About two minutes. When you vanished, I went upstairs to your room in case you were there. I was sure I was knocking at the door of Room Twenty-seven just now.”

Luca cleared his throat. “As you will see from the clock, it’s time for champagne and cake.” He set two plates down on Eve’s table. The cakes were a work of art. Eve stared at the white chocolate octopus closest to her, its tentacles unfurling in elegant loops, the green ripple of pistachio making it look like a sculpture carved from marble. “I’m going to get some sleep while I still can,” Luca went on, “and I suggest you both do the same once you’re finished here. Tomorrow is a big day. In the meantime, take anything else you’d like from the cake counter. I highly recommend the gâteaux de voyage.”

He disappeared out the door, leaving the two of them alone. Max joined her at the table, and she found it impossible to stop looking at him. She was mesmerised by all the ways he was different and all the ways he was the same. A person could change a lot in seventeen years and for a moment, she missed the twenty-year-old she’d known and wondered how much of him was left in the different man sitting across the table from her. She suddenly recalled Max’s words from that first night in the Palm Bar.

You marry some woman, and you vow to honour and love her for the rest of your days, but she won’t stay the same person and nor will you, so how can you possibly promise to love a person you haven’t yet met?

But as Eve looked at Max, it didn’t matter that time had passed. She could see the twenty-year-old still there beneath the surface, and she knew that he wasn’t a different person, not really, only a new version of the same soul that she had loved before. And she knew in her bones that she would love him as he was now, and in all the versions of him that would come after that, and she wanted to see him tomorrow, and next week, and next year, for the rest of her life. Or, at least, in a different life. But not here and now. Not when there was Bella to think about.

“You told me something a couple of days ago,” Max said, lighting up a cigarette.

Eve tried to order the days inside her head, searching for the one he was referring to, but her mind kept going back to the POWs on the ward.

“What did I say?” she finally asked.

“You said that you’re not beautiful.” Max inhaled smoke, breathed it out slowly. “But that’s not true. Some types of beauty aren’t visible at first glance. Seventeen years ago, and now still, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. My music is for you. It’s all for you, every note and bar.”

In another version of this moment—one where they had both been born in the same time period and met in the normal way—these would have been the words Eve most wanted to hear. They would have filled her up with such joy. But here they were no use to her at all, they were just ash in a long-cold hearth. She couldn’t see any rabbits in the room, but they might as well have been there; they were always there inside her head, sniff-snuffling about in all the dark corners.

“Don’t,” she said. It was difficult to look at Max, so she looked at the clock instead and saw that both hands were pointing to Truth.

“No, I’ve waited seventeen years to say this and I’m not waiting any longer.” Max took another drag of the cigarette. When he exhaled, the smoke seemed to twist itself into tentacles in the air between them for a moment. “I know you regret what happened in the steam baths,” he said. “I was never quite sure why, or where exactly it went wrong between us, but I must tell you that I don’t regret it and never have.”

“Why are you saying this?” Eve asked. “Are you hoping to persuade me to give up the writing paper? To choose you instead?”

Max looked startled. “No,” he said at once. “No, that’s…That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

“Then what—?”

He paused, his cigarette burning forgotten for a moment between his fingers. “It’s a maze,” he said.

“What is?”

“All of it. This hotel. The octopuses. The loop of time that keeps playing out. The music.”

“The hand,” Eve said quietly. “The hand holding mine in the dark.”

“The horse,” Max added. “The birds.”

For a moment, Eve could almost see them, the dark wings fluttering and flapping in the corners of her vision. And her octopus didn’t like that. She felt the burn as it slid over her skin, preparing to flail its tentacles, if need be, to squeeze and squeeze until fragments of beak and bone were all that remained. The birds vanished then, and Eve’s octopus stilled.

“But mazes,” Max said, “have exits. And you can find your way out.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “And you?”

He smiled slightly. “I’m not here. Not really. I was supposed to die in the war.” He met her gaze. “Or here at the hotel. A man knows when his time is up sometimes. He’ll sense there’s a shell out there with his name on it. And it’s all right, in the end, because I know when I go, I’ll be helping you. And that’s what I came here to do. It’s the thing I’ve been waiting for almost my whole life. I’m not trying to change your mind about the writing paper, I’m telling you that it’s all right. I understand why you need to do it and I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”

Eve took a deep breath. She was afraid to speak too much while the hands of that clock were pointing to Truth, in case she revealed things she didn’t wish to reveal.

“I don’t regret anything at all about 1918,” she said carefully. “Not one single moment. And I’m…I’m sorry you ever thought differently and I’m sorry it has to end this way between us.”

“The good times don’t last,” Max replied. “That’s just how it is. But I’m glad I met you, Eve Shaw.” He glanced at the clock once more. “We should go.” He nodded down at her scavenger hunt card lying on the table. “You’ve still got one last octopus and clock to find before the party tonight. But I hope you won’t mind me saying that you look exhausted. We should do as Luca suggests and get a few hours’ sleep before the morning.”

Eve wanted to protest, to continue with the hunt immediately. But the fact was that she didn’t know where to look. She’d looked everywhere, hadn’t she? She’d even looked in the past and it still hadn’t been enough. She was exhausted. And the lure of sleep was irresistible. She and Max returned to the lift, and as the door slid closed, she reached for his hand—even though she knew that she shouldn’t. But she wanted to feel the warmth and the rightness of his fingers entwined with hers one final time. When the lift doors opened on her floor, she couldn’t let him go. One way or another, this was the last night they would ever be together. And it was so hard to say goodbye.

“Will you stay with me?” she found herself asking.

“I will.”

They went to Room 27 and crawled beneath the covers fully dressed. Max wrapped his arms around Eve and rested his chin on top of her head, his body warming her back. A feeling spread through Eve that was so alien it took her a moment to identify it. This was security and warmth and contentment. This was happiness and love. This was peace. And her heart broke because she knew she couldn’t keep any of it. That she would have to let it all go tomorrow.

But, for now, she held on to Max and fell into the relief of a dreamless sleep.

—

When Eve woke the next morning, Max was still there in the bed with her, one arm draped over her stomach. She waited for feelings of awkwardness or embarrassment, but they never came. It felt right, waking up together like this. She wished that she could linger there with him, but time was running out, so she nudged him awake and said, “It’s morning. We have to go.”

“All right.” Max sat up, rubbing his eyes. “I’ll go back to my room to get changed. Meet you downstairs in half an hour?”

“See you then.”

Once he’d gone, Eve changed out of her nurse’s uniform for the final time and had a wash before looking into the wardrobe to see what outfit it had selected for her today—a belted polka-dot teal dress with pockets in the skirt and a matching bolero.

Max was waiting for her by the fountain in the lobby. They were about to head towards the corridor when Anna came storming over to them. She was still wearing last night’s evening gown and her hair was in disarray, as if she’d been running her hands through it.

“Where is it?” she hissed.

“Where’s what?” Eve asked, startled.

“The key! To the lift. I know you’ve been down to the basement.”

“I’ve got it,” Max said, rummaging in his pocket and handing it over to her.

Anna stared at the object in her hand. “I have the only key. There is one key to the lift, one, and it doesn’t leave my side. How did you come by another?”

“You’ve got a lot of questions,” Eve said. “But so do I. Why did you trick me into checking out in 1918? Why did you pretend we’d never met before?”

Anna stared at her. “I didn’t trick you. I was following my instructions. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do every step of the way. You’re the one who’s getting it wrong and ruining everything. Down in the basement, which trunks did you look in?”

“We looked in a few that had our own names on them,” Max said.

“And one suitcase for Nikolas Roth,” Eve added.

The colour drained from Anna’s face so fast that she looked as if she might faint.

“The contents?” she whispered.

“There were paintings,” Eve replied.

She didn’t go on because Anna recoiled as if Eve had slapped her. “You saw them?”

“Well, yes.”

“But you can’t. You can’t!”

“Why not?” Eve replied. “What does it matter now?”

But Anna didn’t reply. She turned on her heel and ran from the lobby without another word. Eve looked at Max, who shrugged.

“I don’t know much about art, but the paintings we saw seemed a bit…average. They weren’t masterpieces. Okay, so we found out their secret. Nikolas Roth wasn’t a genius artist. He was just a mediocre dabbler. So what? Who cares? We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

Eve knew he was right, so she tried to put thoughts of Anna from her mind. They went to get some breakfast, although she was almost too tense to eat and could only pick half-heartedly at a croissant. They were just finishing up when there was a shout from the doorway.

“It’s Anna Roth!” someone cried. “She’s outside burning the guests’ luggage!”

Chapter 48

When they reached the sunbathing lawn, the fire was already several metres high. A can of petrol lay to one side and Eve realised that Anna must have doused the trunks with it. They blazed fiercely, spitting out red sparks and billows of smoke that made eyes sting and throats burn. There was quite a crowd of guests there, exclaiming loudly and angrily as they tried to work out whose possessions were being incinerated. Anna ignored them all. She stood worryingly close to the flames, with her arms folded across her chest, staring into the fire. There were tears in her eyes, but anger radiated from her as strongly as the heat from the flames. She had no coat, and her dress was impossibly scarlet against the fresh snow that had fallen in the night.

“It’s all right,” a man said. Everyone turned to see Tristan hurrying across the grounds towards them, a coat in his hands. “Please don’t be alarmed. These are not guests’ trunks. They’re Roth suitcases, taken from storage.”

“But what’s inside them?” one of the guests asked. “Why is she burning them?”

Anna glanced up through the flames and her eyes met Eve’s, just as one of the trunks buckled and a pile of paintings and music boxes spilled out. It was impossible to tell what the paintings had once been since the canvases were aflame and the scent of burning paint filled the air. The music boxes had all been beautiful once but were already falling into charred pieces. And there it was, alight on the ground—the mirrored piano with the white octopus on top of it, the music box that played the most beautiful music in the world. Eve groaned and stepped towards it but there was nothing she could do, nothing anyone could do now. It was already gone.

“She’s mad,” one of the guests said. “Those objects must be priceless.”

“Please go back inside,” Tristan urged. “As you know, we lost our parents quite recently and this is…It’s a private affair.”

One by one, the guests returned to the hotel in a grumbling and disgruntled group. Tristan had gone up to Anna, draped the coat over her shoulders, and put his arm around her, whispering something in her ear. Eve could feel the other woman’s eyes burning into her and she knew in her bones that this was Bella, and that her sister was furious with her for what she’d done and that she was simply never, ever going to let her go. There would always be balloons, and apples, and rabbits following her wherever she went, and gates shrieking on their hinges inside her head, and all that Eve would ever have to hold on to would be the inky tentacles of her octopus.

She took a step closer to Anna, meeting the other woman’s eyes through the flames. “None of this is real, is it?”

Anna met her gaze and her lips formed into a tight, straight line. “You should never have put all this on me. It’s unfair. It’s an unfair burden.”

“Anna!” Tristan said in a warning tone. “Don’t.”

“I don’t even know how you’re here!” Eve cried. “You died! You died twenty-four years ago!”

“No!” Anna shook her head vigorously. “No, I didn’t. You did!”

“What?”

“You’re the one who’s dead.”

Anna started to cry, then—noisy, messy sobs that caused big, fat tears to spill from her eyes and track mascara in dark lines down her face. And Eve felt a strange shiver run through her—that feeling people described as someone walking over their grave. She felt suddenly that Anna was right and that she was already dead, that she had died some time ago, that perhaps she had never really been here at all. She remembered someone once telling her that when the phrase first started to be used, it was common to hear it in the form of “a rabbit walked over my grave.”

Don’t forget to close the gate….

Tristan put his arms around Anna, and she pressed her face into his chest. “Please return to the hotel,” he said quietly. “My sister and I need a moment to ourselves.”

“Come on,” Max said, already walking away. “Let’s go.”

Eve was desperate to put some distance between herself and Anna, so she followed Max to the lobby. Their clothes and hair smelled of smoke and she felt a deep, dreadful pang of loss at the image of that music box crumpling into ash in the flames. It was such a senseless, perverse thing to have done. And what had all of this even been for? Was there even a scavenger hunt or was it all just an elaborate punishment? A different way to make Eve suffer?

“Show me the octopus again,” Max said.

“What octopus?” Eve replied. Her eyes went to the one sprawled in the lower bowl of the fountain, and for a moment she saw it as it soon would be—covered in algae, chipped and broken, and forgotten and alone.

“That sculpture with the hook on its head. I must have brought it to you in 2016 for a reason, and I still think it’s got to be the last octopus.”

Eve wished once more that she could give the whole thing up, but there was a rabbit sitting on top of the grand piano, watching her, and she knew that she couldn’t, no matter how painful it was. They returned to Eve’s room, and she gave Max the octopus but didn’t pay much attention when he started talking about it again. Her thoughts were too full of Anna and the things she’d said. The idea went through her mind that perhaps the entire point of the White Octopus Hotel was that it was a place for Bella and herself to change places. Eve would enter the hotel through one door and Bella would walk out through another. Eve, after all, had had her turn at life. Perhaps now it was Bella’s turn to get that same chance—the one Eve had snatched from her all those years ago.

“Well, are you coming?” Max was saying.

Eve shook her head. “You go. There’s something else I want to do.”

Max disappeared with the sculpture and when Eve went downstairs alone, she wasn’t hunting for octopuses this time; she was hunting for ghosts. She walked straight to the Smoking Room. It was still quite early, and she’d thought the room might be empty and that the telephone might ring just for her. And maybe this time she’d pick it up and hear whatever it was Bella had to say. Just take it all—the recriminations, the hatred, the blame. But the room was already occupied by another person. Nan sat cross-legged in the seat built into the telephone table. The Bakelite receiver was pressed to her ear. Just as before, the phone wasn’t plugged into the wall, but Nan was talking to someone on the other end of the line.

Chapter 49

“Yes,” Nan said cheerfully. “Yes, I’ll tell her. Bye!”

She reached over to hang up the receiver with a solid clunk.

Eve cleared her throat, realising her mouth had gone dry. “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

Nan looked around. “Oh, hello! I was taking a message for you. Adults can’t understand child ghosts. Only other children can.”

Eve’s eyes went to the phone. It was still and silent, but it seemed to Eve that it gave off a dangerous sort of something—a warning, like a bomb yet to explode. She wondered briefly whether she could tell Nan she didn’t want to hear the message, but wasn’t that why she’d come to the Smoking Room? To hear from Bella? Not Annabella Roth the woman, but the little girl who’d been her sister.

“She said she’s tired and wants to go now.”

Eve took a deep breath. There was no way of knowing whether Nan had actually spoken to Bella, or whether she was simply playing make-believe. A gate creaked loudly inside her head and she saw a rabbit hopping about on the other side of the mirror.

“Why are you upset?” Nan asked. “Is it because of Aunt Anna? Because she put it in the fire?”

“She burned the music boxes and paintings,” Eve replied. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, and she burned the special one,” Nan said. “The music box that plays the most beautiful music in the world. It’s broken now.”

“Yes.”

“Daddy says Aunt Anna is very stressed,” Nan said. “Because she worries about the hotel, because she loves it so much, and we’re not supposed to bother her.” She paused. “The music isn’t gone, though.”

“It’s not?”

“No.” Nan beckoned Eve closer. “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered.

“I think so,” Eve whispered back.

“Aunt Anna doesn’t know about this,” Nan said. “But my mouse band can do it.”

“Do…what?”

“They can play it. The most beautiful song in the world.”

Eve recalled the tuneless whirs and clicks from the last time the girl had put on a mouse concert and felt her burst of hope fading away. The mice musicians couldn’t play the most beautiful music in the world. They couldn’t play any music at all.

“I’ll show you,” Nan said.

She reached for Eve’s hand, making her flinch. The last child’s hand she’d held had been Bella’s. She had a sudden strong flash of memory of her sister reaching for her whenever their mother took them to the forest. It was something she’d forgotten for many years, but Bella always wanted to hold Eve’s hand as they walked towards the duck pond. And when they got there, Bella would try to eat the bread they’d brought for the ducks, and Eve would say, “No, Bella, you’re supposed to give it to the ducks. Look.”

She’d toss in some crumbs, watching them land on the murky surface of the pond. And then Bella threw her bread in too, because she always wanted to do what Eve did.

“That’s right!” Eve exclaimed.

And Bella beamed, and then she giggled, and Eve felt a rush of warmth and love for her sister, and a burst of pleasure at the fact that she was the one who’d made her laugh. There had been moments like that, when Bella wasn’t being a pain, or getting in her way, or crying, or making a fuss, or throwing food on the floor. There had been times when Eve had been glad to see her, when she’d liked her, when she’d taken care of her and they’d enjoyed each other’s company. It was hard to remember those moments sometimes now, but they had been there.

Eve swallowed hard as she followed Nan down the corridor of the hotel. The child was so completely trusting, not realising that she was holding hands with a killer, as she skipped straight to the Billiards Room. Eve had been inside it before, on that first day of the scavenger hunt. The room had one clock—an old, German-made billiards timing clock—and two octopuses, in the form of the twin lights suspended above the table. They were switched on now, illuminating the smooth green felt below. The room was empty at this time of day, but there was a small whiskey bar in the corner, along with two high-backed armchairs. The walls were lined with bookshelves and glossy wooden panels and there was, to Eve’s relief, not a painting in sight.

“This way,” Nan said, humming to herself as she dropped Eve’s hand and went over to a shelf. Upon it sat the Merrymakers clockwork mouse band Nan had shown her before—the four tin mice assembled around their piano.

“It looks like the mice are all wearing masks,” Eve said. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

Nan glanced up at her. “Everyone wears masks,” she said matter-of-factly. She held the box up to Eve. “Well, aren’t you going to press the lever?”

Eve did so and the four mice sprang enthusiastically to life once again, bashing at their instruments in their clockwork frenzy, but it wasn’t just whirs and clicks this time, it was music. The same extraordinary, life-changing music Eve had heard on a day that was both yesterday and seventeen years ago in the frigidarium.

She closed her eyes and heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves on mosaic tiles, felt sweat run down her bare skin as Max whispered her name in her ear, and the snow fell outside, and red apples shone in the dark. Someone tugged at her hand, and she looked down to see Nan, pointing up towards the ceiling.

“Look,” she whispered. “A fairy.”

Eve squinted towards the lights. There was something up there—some bright, fluttering thing, dancing and dashing about in a wordlessly joyous way. It was difficult to tell what it was exactly; it almost looked like a piece of broken mirror, if glass could frolic in the air. Certainly if any music could draw out fairies, it was this song.

But eventually it finished, and the tin mice were all still once more. The shiny, bright whatever-it-was fluttered down towards the bookshelves, landing briefly on a small model of a globe before twinkling into nothing.

“They like the music too,” Nan said. “But when it finishes, they always go back to the mountains. Dad says you can’t keep fairies in the hotel. You have to let them leave when they want to.”

Eve walked over to the bookshelf, still looking at the globe. It was a small model of the world she’d noticed before, but now that she looked closer, she noticed there was a seam running down the middle of it. When she pressed her fingertips into the groove, it split into two halves, like an Easter egg.

One half of the globe held a small clock—the last one on the scavenger hunt list. The other half had space for a single photo—of two little girls in a garden. One was about three years old, and the other was an infant. They weren’t looking at the photographer, but at each other, both laughing helplessly at some long-forgotten joke.

“Nan,” Eve said, turning around with the clock. “Do you know who these two girls are?”

The child looked at the photo, then shook her head. “Is one of them me?”

“No. This is me.” She pointed at the older girl. “And that’s my sister. Bella.”

Nan peered closer. “How did they get it in colour? Normally pictures are black and white.”

“Nan.” Eve crouched down to the child’s level. “Do you know what’s really going on at this hotel? Do you know what the scavenger hunt is all about?”

“Yep.” She nodded.

“Will you please tell me?”

“I’m not allowed,” Nan said at once. “It’s a secret.” She leaned a little closer to Eve. “Aunt Anna thinks I can’t keep a secret. That’s why I’m not supposed to talk to you. But my granny said I’m really, really good at them. That’s why she told me about the mice and the beautiful song. And I know you’re going to win the prize.” She sprang forwards and planted a kiss on Eve’s cheek. “I’m glad you saw the fairy. I need to go help Aunt Mila in the Sugar Room now.”

Before Eve could think of stopping her, she’d snatched the mouse band from the shelf and skipped out the door. Eve looked back at the globe. How could a photograph of herself and Bella possibly have found its way to the White Octopus Hotel in 1935? Just then, a couple of guests walked into the Billiards Room with their scavenger hunt cards, so Eve slipped out into the corridor. When she found Max, he’d had no more luck with the octopus statue than she had.

“Maybe it didn’t originally come from the hotel at all,” he said. “I can’t find a place anywhere for it to go. Perhaps there’s some other room like the Sugar Room that only appears at a certain time, under particular conditions. Maybe there’s some password or secret entrance that we’ll never have any hope of discovering.”

Nevertheless, they searched together for the rest of the day, poking into every corner of the hotel they could think of. When the rabbit appeared, Eve tried to ignore it at first, like always. Max couldn’t see it, so she knew it was part of her own haunting and not the real flesh-and-blood creature that belonged to Anna Roth. But then the rabbit did something it had never done before. It bit her. Sharp little nips of her ankles that stung more than she expected.

Eve had never deliberately touched the rabbit, but this time she grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and was very tempted—oh, so tempted—to throttle the damn thing. But then she saw a bedroom door reflected in the rabbit’s eyes, and it wasn’t right because they were standing outside Room 11, but the number the rabbit was reflecting back to her was a 7. She heard Bella’s footsteps as she pitter-pattered her way down the corridor, but when she turned around there was nothing there.

“What are you doing?” Max asked, staring at her.

She dropped the rabbit and watched as it hopped away down the corridor towards the stairs.

“I think we need to go downstairs.”

She and Max followed the rabbit down to the floor below, where it stopped before Room 7. The next moment, it rose up on its back legs and began scrabbling and scratching at the door.

“It’s trying to get into Room Seven,” Eve said. “The rabbit.”

She walked over and knocked. No one answered or spoke, but when she looked at the gap beneath the door, she saw that telltale flicker of light and shadow that told her someone was there, just out of sight on the other side.

She balled her hand into a fist and hammered it against the wood. “Who’s in there?”

There was no reply, and the shadows didn’t move this time. It was almost as if Eve had imagined it. Yet she knew that she hadn’t. There was someone in the room. Another time-travelling guest. She could feel them breathing. She could feel them staring at her through the wood. When she looked down again, the rabbit had gone. From downstairs, the sound of jazz started to filter through to them.

“It sounds like the party has started,” Max said. He touched her arm gently and Eve thought of that day seventeen years ago in the steam baths. She would have given almost anything to have him touch her like that again, or at least to hold on to the memory of those moments when she checked out. It seemed so cruel to have to forget them entirely. “We tried,” Max said. “Perhaps, after all, it’s a game that can’t be won.”

“Perhaps.” But Eve was tired of the game—tired of the mysteries, and the clocks, even tired of the octopuses. In the pit of her stomach, though, she felt a treacherous flicker of relief at the idea that she wouldn’t be able to complete the scavenger hunt, that she would not have to ask for a prize that would kill the man she loved.

“You told me something happens at the party,” Max went on. “Something that makes the hotel close its doors. Perhaps the last octopus is there?”

Eve nodded. She would have to go to the party, of course, would have to see it through to the end. They returned to their rooms to get changed. Tonight, the wardrobe in Eve’s bedroom produced a beautiful floor-length gown that shimmered with thousands of hand-woven beads forming geometric art deco patterns in rose gold and black. A long crystal necklace in the shape of a snake accompanied it, along with a beaded clutch and elbow-length lace gloves. Eve scooped up the octopus sculpture to tuck into the bag, then went down to meet Max outside the ballroom. He wore a black tuxedo, and she felt a flash of déjà vu when she looked at him.

“Do you think we might have done this already?” she asked. “Been to this party and worn these same clothes? Danced to the same songs?”

“Time doesn’t work properly in this place,” Max said, “so anything is possible.”

Maybe, after all, they would never escape the maze. Perhaps they were destined to just go around and around the hotel in a loop that didn’t end. And there was something comforting about the thought—of hiding here forever, of being with Max forever, never going forwards or backwards, of not having to make an impossible choice. They could hear music and laughter and the pop of champagne corks from beyond the glass art deco doors. Max offered Eve his arm and she took it, feeling the warmth of his body through his sleeve and wishing that she could hold on for just a short while longer.

They stepped into the party together.

Chapter 50

The ballroom was bright with candles and glittering lights and jazz. All around them, people were dancing, and laughing, and sipping champagne from crystal coupes. Astonishingly beautiful sugar creatures graced silver platters, along with rows and rows of white chocolate octopuses.

As soon as they entered the room, Anna appeared beside them, wearing a silk dress in champagne gold, trimmed with ivory pearls.

“Welcome to the party,” she said. “I’m afraid I owe you an apology for earlier. Tristan pointed out to me that you never told me what the paintings looked like. The ones you saw in the basement?”

As soon as Eve started to describe them, Anna relaxed. “Those weren’t Nikolas Roth’s work,” she said. “Those were paintings done by our guests. My parents used to encourage people to make art when they stayed here. They found that it could help—especially those people who found it difficult to put their suffering into words.”

Eve thought of the dark, disturbed paintings she’d seen, and they made more sense now that she knew they were various people’s attempts to capture their own suffering. She knew from experience that there was a relief in being able to do so.

“But why would it matter if we saw your father’s paintings anyway?” she asked. “And why did you burn the music boxes? And pretend we’d never met before?”

“Excuse me, there’s someone trying to get my attention—” Anna began to walk away, but Eve reached out to grip her arm.

“If you think we’re going to change places at the end of all this, then you owe me some answers.”

Anna frowned. “Change places?”

Eve took a step closer. “I know,” she said. “I know what you want. You’re hoping that when the night ends, you’ll walk out of this hotel and I won’t. Don’t try to deny it.”

Anna met her gaze. “I don’t hope that’s going to happen,” she said simply, almost kindly. “I know.”

“Smile for the camera!”

There was the bright flash and pop of a camera going off and Eve felt that flood of déjà vu once more.

“I’ll answer your questions,” Anna replied. “I promise you that. But sometimes, you know, answers just lead to more questions. Sometimes the questions never end. Please be so good as to wait until the party is over. It’s my last one as hostess, after all.”

It was only after she’d walked away that Eve recalled that Anna wasn’t supposed to know that this was the last party or her last night as hostess. Not unless the reason the hotel finally closed was because of something Anna herself was going to do and had perhaps been planning all along….

“Drink?” Max said.

They went to the champagne bar. Eve accepted a sparkling coupe from the barman and the glass was cold, so cold, through her lace glove, the bubbles as small and bright and beautiful as diamonds.

“Did you ever find out what it was all for?” a man beside them asked.

“What’s that?” Max asked.

“You know. All of this.” The man gave a wave to encompass the room. “The hotel. The performance. Why did Anna hire us? Was it a practice run for something?”

“Anna hired you?” Eve said. “To do what?”

“To play the part of hotel guests, obviously. And to try to win her scavenger hunt. If even half of the stories we were told to circulate amongst ourselves are true, then there’s an object or two I would love to get my hands on.” The man’s voice was suddenly wistful, but when he saw their puzzled expressions, he looked abruptly unsure. “But aren’t you actors too? I thought all of us were.”

Eve and Max both shook their heads.

“Oh dear. I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything. I just thought, given that it’s the last night, you might know where we’re headed next….”

He trailed off awkwardly, then rapidly made his excuses and left.

Eve thought back to the gentlemen she had offended with her very presence on her first night in the Palm Bar. Had that been a genuine reaction or just a performance? She supposed she would never know. Though—actors or not—they were still just men of their time.

Nan appeared then, holding a crumpled leaf. “She said to give this to you.”

Eve didn’t need to ask who. She took it from Nan and for a flash of a moment she was back home in the garden with Bella holding a leaf out to her in chubby fingers.

Time works differently in the mountains….

“You always try to pretend you can’t see the rabbit,” Nan went on conversationally. “Why don’t you ever follow it instead?”

I did follow it, she thought. It took me to Room Seven.

She leaned down to the little girl and said, “Who’s the guest in Room Seven, Nan? Is it Bella?”

Nan let out a squeal of laughter. “No, silly!”

She scampered off, still giggling. Eve’s eyes went to the many mirrors that lined the ballroom. It suddenly looked as if there was another girl beside Nan—a much younger child wearing a blue-and-white party dress with a large appliquéd bunny on the front.

From the other side of the room came the ting-ting-ting of someone tapping a fork against a crystal glass and Anna Roth was standing on the stage at the front, waiting for the room to fall silent as everyone turned towards her.

“Thank you all for coming to our party tonight,” she began.

Somewhere close by, a camera flashed.

Don’t forget to close the gate….

And Eve was back there, on the path outside her house. She was four years old, wearing her beloved purple dress and looking at her balloons. When she reached out for the gate, the metal was cold beneath her fingers, and she noticed that the blue paint was smart and neat, no longer rusting off in flakes. She closed it with a clang. And found herself once again in the ballroom of the White Octopus Hotel.

“I apologise for ending the festivities early, but as you can see, the weather would make it impossible to continue.”

The guests all began to exclaim and point up towards the ceiling and the spectacular night sky painted there. Snow was falling from the inky-blue paint in soft white flurries that landed in people’s champagne coupes, settled on silk dresses, and extinguished the candles one by one. The glass chandeliers above remained lit but could only half illuminate the vast space.

The White Octopus will close its doors for good on the day snow falls from the ceiling and other lives are glimpsed within the mirrors….

“You there.” Max signalled the barman. “Two more champagnes before we’re all thrown out in the snow.”

Eve couldn’t tear her eyes from the mirror. She could see it, that other life. There was a party going on within the glass—the one from all those years ago, the party that had never happened. Except it was happening. Eve saw her four-year-old self running around the summer garden with her friends, while her mum and aunt and various other adults looked on, smiling, laughing, eating cake, being normal. And Bella was there, alive and happy, toddling around in those uncertain, wobbly steps until she was standing right up against the mirror, looking out at Eve. The little girl raised her hand in a wave and Eve left Max at the champagne bar to walk over to her.

She crouched down close to the glass, but it was impossible to hear anything of the party on the other side. Yet she could so very almost hear it, and smell it, and touch it, and taste it. Her heart raced as she met Bella’s gaze, but this wasn’t the bitter ghost of her imaginings. The little girl beamed out of the mirror, her whole face lit up with pleasure at the sight of her sister. She scooped up a leaf from the ground and pressed it against the glass.

Eve put her hand up to the cold surface, her fingertips resting against Bella’s. She couldn’t feel the warmth of her sister’s skin, but the leaf was passing through the mirror. Eve looked down and saw it resting in her hand, completely covered in a reflective coat, mirror-dipped and cold. She looked back up at Bella and there was so much that she wanted to say, but the little girl was already giving a final wave and running back to the party. Then ice crackled along the surface, and the mirrors froze in their frames, turning opaque and hiding the other world from their view.

“The sleighs have been loaded with your luggage and are waiting outside to take you across the lake,” Anna went on from the stage. “Arrangements have been made with another hotel there, who have rooms available to take you all in for the night.”

“What about the scavenger hunt?” someone called. “Who won?”

Anna lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “No one managed to find all the octopuses. Perhaps some prizes aren’t meant to be won. I hope you have enjoyed your stay.”

Eve stood up and stared at the silver leaf in her hand, the exact double of the one Anna Roth wore on a chain around her throat. The guests began to make their way out of the French doors, which had been opened to reveal a fleet of sleighs waiting for them outside. But out of the corner of her eye, Eve saw the rabbit as it hopped from the room in the other direction, heading back into the hotel.

Why don’t you ever follow it instead?

“One last toast to old friends before we have to go?” Max had joined her, two coupes of champagne in his hands. Then he blinked. “Where did you get that leaf?” he asked.

“There’s someone still here, I think,” Eve said, slipping the leaf into her pocket. “The guest in Room Seven.”

“You know, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on anymore,” Max said. He set the champagne on a nearby table before following her out the door and into the corridor.

When they got to the lobby, it was deserted. There was no one to prevent Eve from examining the guest book on the front desk. She didn’t even need to riffle through the pages. The last entry contained the check-in details for Room 7. According to the book, the guest had checked in just two hours ago. And there was the name printed in the final column: Eve Shaw.

“But you’re in Room Twenty-seven,” Max said, peering over her shoulder.

“It’s a different me,” Eve replied.

Her mind raced. It must be a future version of herself, since she didn’t remember ever being inside Room 7. She wondered how much older she would be and how she had managed to find her way back to the hotel….

“I need to talk to her.”

When they reached the first floor and stood before the door to Room 7, Eve raised her fist, but she didn’t hammer the door this time. Instead, she knocked gently.

“Please,” she said quietly. “I know you’re in there. Please let me in.”

There was a brief silence. Then they heard the key turn in the lock and the door swung open.

Chapter 51

They stepped into a guest room that was just like the others. A single occupant sat on the bed, dressed all in black. Black dress, black shoes, black hairband. Eve recognised herself at once, but she wasn’t a woman as she’d been expecting. The jolt of shock made the clutch bag fall from her hand, the contents scattering upon the floor. She was looking at herself as she’d been at four years old. She knew exactly how old she was and what day this was because she recognised the outfit. The one she’d worn to Bella’s funeral. The second-worst day of her life. The little girl watched them as they walked into the room and closed the door.

“I’m not going back,” the girl snapped. “You can’t make me.” Then her different-coloured eyes fell on Max and she said, “Oh! You’re the magician.” Her face lit up as she scrambled from the bed and came over to them. “Will you do another magic trick for me?”

How did she remember that? Could it be because she was back in the hotel? But, no, adult Eve had remembered this even before she’d returned to the White Octopus. She’d remembered the magician and the fountain and the peppermint creams. How was that possible if guests lost their memories upon checking out? How was any of this possible?

“How did you get here?” Max asked.

“I drew a door,” the girl replied. “And I stared at it until it turned real.”

Eve recalled only blurred, horrid fragments of that day. Alone in her bedroom with her crayons, scribbling and scribbling, refusing to come downstairs and put her best shoes on. Wishing with all her soul that she could be anywhere other than home and anyone other than herself. Wishing for a door that could take her anywhere in the world she wanted to go.

“Then I used my key.” She held it up and Eve saw the loops of brass tentacles curling around the number seven.

Room Seven’s key was recently lost, I’m afraid….

Mrs. Roth’s words echoed in her mind. “Where did you get that?” she demanded.

“Nan gave it to me,” young Eve said, a little defensively. “She said it belonged to me.”

Eve remembered the day of the afternoon tea and how she’d seen Nan drop something onto her younger self’s lap. She’d thought it was a peppermint cream but perhaps, after all, it had been this key….

Max glanced around. “Is your mother with you?”

The girl’s face shut down again and she shook her head. “She’s going to the church. Everyone’s going. To say goodbye. To Bella.”

Eve swallowed hard. “You’ve got to go too,” she said. “Your mum is…She’s waiting for you to go downstairs and put your shoes on. It’ll upset her if you don’t. It’ll make things even worse.”

The little girl clenched her jaw. “I won’t.”

Eve gritted her teeth. She wanted to shake her younger self in that moment. To shake her, and shake her, and shake her.

“You’ve got to.”

“I WON’T!” the girl screamed—a screech so loud that it seemed to pierce Eve’s eardrums.

She took a step closer to the girl. The rage was too strong, she was going to hit her, she knew she was; she couldn’t help herself. The expression on her face must have frightened her younger self because the girl took a step back and quickly said, “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Eve cried. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter how sorry you are! It’s too late!”

She didn’t know what to do with this child. There was no chance that she could forgive her, none whatsoever. Not when she hated her more fiercely than she had ever hated anything.

“It was you,” she whispered harshly, letting all the hatred flow out into her voice, her face. “You did this.”

Stop it, a voice said inside her head. Stop it, stop it.

“Stop it,” Max said.

Very deliberately, he moved Eve to one side, like she didn’t matter at all, like she was nothing, and then he went to crouch in front of the little girl. Eve was surprised to see that she wasn’t crying. She didn’t look upset at all, only angry, furious—even more furious than adult Eve. She was, in fact, the angriest person in the room. Maybe even the angriest person in the world.

“I hate you!” she snarled. “I hate all of you!”

Without a word, Max put his arms around her and held her tightly. The girl stood rigid for a moment or two before melting into him. And now tears did sparkle in her eyes and Eve could see that she was trembling so much she could hardly stand up. Her hands went around the back of Max’s neck and she clung to him like her life depended on it.

“Today will be very hard,” Max said. “Some days are. But you can do hard things, Eve.”

“I’m never going back,” the girl whispered. “Never. Everyone will stare at me. In the church. They’ll whisper and they’ll stare.”

“We can’t control what other people do,” Max said. “The other people don’t matter. You’re stronger than they are.”

“Bella is gone,” the girl said so quietly her words were almost lost. “She’s gone.”

Max nodded. “People go sometimes. They just go and there’s nothing at all we can do about it except let them leave. And turn up for the people who are still there. Your mum and dad are waiting for you, aren’t they? Even if you don’t want to go back for yourself, you’ve got to go back for them.”

“But—”

“If you stay here, then you’ll have to live with me,” Eve said. “And I’m even more angry than your mum is.”

The girl shrank back at that, closing her eyes briefly. Eve knew she felt trapped, that it seemed like there was nowhere in the world that she could go, but what could she do? What could anyone do?

She tried to soften her voice and said, “Hiding doesn’t help anyway.”

“How about we make a deal?” Max said. “I’ll perform one last magic trick if you’ll go back home.”

The girl hesitated for a moment but then nodded. Max smiled. “Say. What’s that hiding in your ear?”

She was about to check, but Max beat her to it. When he brought his hand down and uncurled his fingers, the fumsup doll was resting in his palm.

“This little fellow brought me a lot of luck,” he told her. “And kept me company through some very difficult times. Now he’ll do the same for you. He likes living in pockets. And every time you feel afraid or alone, just give his head a rub. It helps a little.”

The girl took the fumsup solemnly. And to Eve’s surprise and relief, she let Max lead her back to the door. But when she got there, she paused, frowning down at the objects that had fallen from Eve’s bag.

“Why have you got the clock octopus?”

Eve looked down at the white octopus sculpture.

Would the little one like to help me wind the clock…?

“The grandfather clock,” she breathed.

“What about it?” Max asked.

Tick.

Tock.

“It’s where the octopus goes.”

“You should put it back,” the little girl said. “Then it will look like the old one I saw in the photo again.”

“Yes,” Eve replied. She could feel the walls closing in on her once more. She was going to win the scavenger hunt after all. “I should.”

The girl put the key in the lock and turned it anticlockwise.

“You can’t take the key,” Eve said. “It belongs to the hotel.”

Her younger self gave her a withering look. “It belongs to me. But I know I can’t take it this time. Nan already told me.”

When she opened the door, it led back to her own bedroom at home. Eve couldn’t look at it and turned away. It was a place she never, ever wanted to go back to, not for one second. And yet here she was sending a four-year-old to face what she could not.

“Bye,” the girl whispered.

“Goodbye, Eve,” Max replied. “And good luck.”

Then the door closed behind her and she was gone. Eve reached down to pick up the octopus, feeling the cold weight of it in her hand—a burden she could never set down. Then she took the key to Room 7 and slid it into her pocket. Reunited again, after all these years.

Max caught her gaze. “You were unfair to her. You must realise that, deep down. You must.”

“She’s responsible.”

“I never said she wasn’t.”

“I can’t forgive her for what she did.” Eve’s breath shuddered through her body. “Not ever.”

“No.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose you will. To the lobby, then.”

They went downstairs and Eve heard Tristan’s words ring inside her head in a curious double echo. The words she had heard him speak when she was both three and twenty-eight years old.

But, Mr. Everly, we don’t really have the faintest notion of what time actually is.

Tick.

The truth is that time will always be as much of a mystery to us as death itself.

Tock.

When she and Max walked over to the grandfather clock, Eve saw that it had three chains. Two of these had weights attached to them, taking the form of traditional cylinders. The chain in the middle was missing its weight entirely, but there was a hook at the end for it to hang from.

Eve reached into the clock and put the octopus in its rightful place.

Chapter 52

A bright flash exploded for the final time, and Eve saw the sparkle of pennies landing inside the fountain, felt a burst of childish delight at a sugar rabbit, and then there was the echoing clip-clop of the trench horse wandering the steam baths, and the air was filled with the most beautiful music in the world, played by a band of tin mice. For a moment the lobby wavered back and forth between splendour and decay, and she couldn’t work out whether the Max before her was twenty, or thirty-six, or eighty as his voice rang inside her head.

Come back to the hotel.

Are you real?

My music is for you. It’s all for you, every note and bar….

“The clock needs winding,” a man said.

Eve looked up, blinking away the last of those firework flashes. She saw that Tristan had entered the lobby, with his brother and sister behind him.

“Congratulations,” Anna said. “You won. I believe it’s the last sheet of writing paper you wish to claim?”

She was holding it out, offering it. Eve walked across the room and took the paper, which crinkled between her fingers. A single blank sheet, with the White Octopus crest at the top.

“Will this really work?” she asked. “Will it send a letter to my younger self?”

Anna nodded. “Shall I fetch you a pen?”

Eve stared at the paper. She could feel Max on one side of her and Bella on the other and she knew that she couldn’t win now that she had a prize. She would lose, whatever she did. Let someone down again, whatever she did. Rip herself in half, whatever she did. Close the goddamned gate. That was all she had to say to change everything, rewrite everything. She would do it. She would. She had to. For her parents, for Bella, for herself, for that lost little four-year-old they’d just met in Room 7.

And yet…

The point—the entire point of all of this—had been to make things right. And how could swapping one life for another be making things right? Here it was, at last, the line Eve could not, would not, cross. She shook her head and handed the paper back to Anna.

“I can’t.”

“Eve—” Anna began.

“No,” she said. “Please, listen. Please try to understand. I would swap places with you. I would. But I won’t swap someone else’s life for yours. I won’t kill Max so that you can live. I’m not killing another person, and I would say that even if it was someone other than Max, someone I didn’t love.”

“It would be eight people, actually,” Anna said.

Eve blinked. “What?”

“It would be eight people you’d have to kill.” Anna took a key from her pocket and set it down on the grand piano. “To bring Bella back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eve asked.

“It’s the clock,” Tristan said. “A grandfather clock has three chains.” He indicated the two on each side. “This one controls the hour chimes, the other the quarter-hour chimes. But the one in the middle is for time. Now that the weight is back in place, it will rewind time by more than five minutes. It will rewind it by forty years and take you back to the day the White Octopus first appeared in the mountains.”

They say the hotel came with the fog.

To Eve’s astonishment, Anna reached out for both her hands, holding them tight, so tight, as if she never wanted to let them go. The mirrored leaf flashed and sparkled at her throat as she swallowed hard. “Haven’t you worked it out yet?” she asked quietly. “I am your Annabella, but not in the way you think. I’m not your sister.” She took a deep breath that ended in a bit of a gulp, and a bit of a sob, and a bit of a smile. “I’m your daughter. And I still miss you so much. Both of you.” She glanced at Max. “You and Father.”

Max had turned completely white as he stared at Anna, Harry, and Tristan. “Are you saying that the three of you…that you’re our children?”

“That isn’t true,” Eve said at once, removing her hands. “I know it isn’t because I would never have children.” She shuddered at the notion. “Never.”

Anna gave a shrug, and her smile was almost a smirk. “Well, that’s a matter for you and Father to discuss, I’m sure.”

“You’d have to be an absolute lunatic to bring children into this world,” Max said. “And what about Nikolas Roth? He’s your father, isn’t he?”

“He’s both of you,” Harry said. For the first time, Eve noticed that he had a framed picture under his arm. He turned this around so that they could see the painting, although it was really more of a sketch. A map. Eve recognised the pencil drawings of golden palms and fan mirrors, clocks and octopuses, fountains and war horses. It was the map she’d drawn herself in the Reading Room.

“You were an artist in 1895,” Harry went on. “But women couldn’t show paintings or have exhibitions, so you took on the name of Nikolas Roth. If you ever needed to make a public appearance, then Papa would go in your place.”

Tristan addressed Max. “You carry on composing too, of course. Your best work. It all goes into the music boxes—until you carry it forwards in time.” The suitcase at Stanley’s, Eve realised with a start. It had been Max who left that. “That’s why Anna had to burn them.”

“You can’t see or hear the thing you’re trying to create before you’ve created it,” Anna said. “Or else you wouldn’t be creating it at all—only copying. You were both very clear on that point. So, yes. I burned the music boxes and paintings, like you asked me to, like I should have done to begin with. But I know you will make it all again.”

“That’s why we took some of the photographs down from the walls too,” Harry said. “Because you’re in them.”

“Well,” Eve said, stepping back from Anna. “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but you’ve got it wrong. Completely wrong. I’m not staying here at the hotel. And I’m not going back in time again either. I mean, what about my parents? I wouldn’t let them believe I’d just disappeared. If I had the strength and decency to go back when I was four, then I’ll damn well do it again now.”

“You know about the time-travelling keys,” Anna replied. “They’ll take you wherever and whenever you want.” She looked at Max. “So, yes, you can later take your collection of sheet music into the future for it to live on there. And, you,” Anna said, turning back to Eve. “You can tell your parents where you’ve gone and that you’re all right.”

Eve thought about it. She could take herself back to 2016 and pick up where she’d left off, moments before Friede arrived to collect her in the boat. She could put her affairs in order back home and then leave that life forever to come back here to the hotel. After all, what was keeping her in that old life? Her job? Her flat? It was almost hard to remember it now or any part of it that had ever really made her happy.

“And you can bring your mother with you,” Anna went on. “To live here.”

Eve let out a harsh laugh. “She’d never come. Our relationship is in ruins. Mum can hardly bear to look at me most of the time.”

Anna shook her head. “No. That’s not true. She’s just…She’s in so many broken bits and doesn’t know how to fix herself. But she doesn’t blame you.”

“She does.”

“She doesn’t. She’ll come and live here with you at the hotel if you ask her to. I know because it’s already happened.” Anna smiled. “You met her here a few days ago. She was so looking forward to having afternoon tea with you one last time. That’s what she was holding on to, I think. We all knew she would die later that same day, because you told us that as well. But she was determined to see you.”

“Afternoon tea?” Eve faltered. “Are you saying that…Mrs. Roth…?”

Anna nodded. “She assumed the name of Roth when you did. But she always kept Jane.”

My own daughter died recently.

If I could see my daughter one last time, I would be honoured to tell her that she was the single greatest joy of my life….

Eve realised she was shaking as she took a step closer to Anna. “Can any of what you’re saying be true?” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” Anna said. “But we have to go now.”

The word Mum rang and rang in her ears.

“Go where?” she asked. “If the White Octopus Hotel has been your home all this time, then what will you do next?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Anna smiled. “We’ve known this moment was coming for a long time and have been planning our future for years. I love the White Octopus with all my heart, but the hotel belongs to the two of you.” Her eyes flicked towards Max. “Or rather, the two of you belong to the hotel. That’s what you always used to say. That you were caretakers for this place. That it chose you. That’s why it allowed you to take your memories with you—because it knew you were coming back. You aren’t guests here. You never were. The hotel is your home. Ours too, for a while. I loved my time here, but now I’d like to do something on my own—perhaps even create a different kind of hotel with a different kind of magic.” Her eyes glittered. “I have such plans, Mama. I know you’ll never get to see them, but I promise you they will be every bit as spectacular as what you did here.”

Harry set the framed sketch of the map down beside the piano. “The hotel won’t look quite the same in 1895. And you’ll see that it reinvents itself throughout the years, moulding itself to the era. But you’ll find plenty that’s familiar.”

“All that remains,” Tristan said, “is to wind the clock once the three of us have gone.” He looked at Eve. “Do you remember how to do it?”

She nodded. “Yes. But I won’t. I already told you. It’s not what I signed up for. Happily ever after isn’t why I’m here.”

Max had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the piano. “That goes for both of us.”

Anna laughed. “Well. Who said anything about happily ever after? You and Father—you loved each other so intensely, so completely, but I’m not going to pretend there weren’t arguments and difficult times. I’m not going to tell you there wasn’t heartache and suffering. Of course there was. There had to be. But still. All I know is that I would like, one day, to meet a woman who looks at me the way you two looked at each other. I’ll chase after a love like that.” She straightened her shoulders. “Now. This next part has nothing to do with us. Perhaps we’ll see you again. Perhaps we won’t. And, Mum, please don’t torture yourself later when you think of this meeting and what you would have liked to say to us. We already know.” She pulled a postcard from her pocket and handed it to Eve. There was a photo of the White Octopus Hotel on the front. “For you to write a message to Dad,” she said, “asking him to come and help you at the hotel. When the time is right, give it to me—the younger me, I mean—and tell me to post it for you on the seventeenth of November in 1935. For now, though, it’s goodbye.”

Eve watched the three of them head out the door and climb into the last sleigh, waiting at the entrance. Then there was the swish of blades on snow, and they were gone, over the frozen lake, leaving Max and Eve alone in the lobby.

“You know,” Max said, rummaging in his pockets for a cigarette, “I categorically did not sign up for this, but…if it’s being handed to me on a silver platter, then I’d be a damned fool not to take it.”

“What?” Eve asked incredulously, thrusting the postcard into her bag. “Go back in time like she said? Make a life together like she said?”

“Why not? You love me, don’t you?”

“I…What makes you think that? I never said that.”

He took a draw on his cigarette, exhaled smoke. “You did, actually. To Anna, just now.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, look, you can deny it all you like, but I won’t believe you. You’re a damn poor liar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

Eve could feel herself getting angry. “Look, even if I did love you—and I’m not saying that I do—but even if I did…it’s not worth the risk.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a pity, because I would risk everything.”

“I don’t want any entanglements. I don’t want any more heartbreak.”

“Love is hard,” Max agreed. “The hardest thing there is.”

“We would hurt each other.”

“We would. Sometimes, I think, it would be wonderful. Other times it would be unbearable. There’s no denying that.”

“There you have it, then.”

“There you have it. You know, even after all those years, you still bear a remarkable resemblance to that little girl we met a few minutes ago in Room Seven. Still hiding, still scared, still daring anyone to try to love you. You think you’re pretty terrifying, don’t you, but I’ve already seen your tentacles, remember, and I served in a war, after all, so you’ll have to do a hell of a lot better than that to frighten me, Eve Shaw.”

Max walked over to the reception desk to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray, before heading towards the corridor.

“Where are you going?” Eve demanded.

“It’s still cocktail hour, as far as I’m concerned,” Max threw over his shoulder. “Wind the clock or don’t wind it. Either way, I’ll be in the bar.”

He left and Eve was alone, listening to the grandfather clock ticking and tocking away the moments. Soon it would be midnight and they would cross over into another day. Unless she wound the clock—which would, of course, be madness, absolute madness, and not something that Eve would ever consider.

—

It was five minutes later and forty years earlier when Eve walked into the polished wooden interior of the Nook. She pulled up a stool next to Max.

“What’s that?” she asked, nodding at his drink.

“Neat whiskey,” Max replied, pointing at the bottle on the bar. “I was going to have a Last Word, but I couldn’t remember how to mix one and…well, there’s no bartender here anymore. I’ll have to learn.”

Eve reached around for a glass and poured a measure. She wondered how many years would pass before she saw the velvet upholstery and golden fronds of the Palm Bar once again. For now, though, she quite liked the quiet cosiness of their own private bar. Even the Eavesdropper wasn’t here yet, right at the very beginning, and the spot on the wall where his curtain would later hang was currently bare. Eve knocked back her drink.

She set the empty glass down. “You called me a coward once.”

“I did not.”

“Yes, you—”

“I said I wouldn’t have had you pegged for a coward,” Max said. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Well, I rewound the clock.” Eve poured herself another drink. “So I hope you realise what you’ve signed up for.”

“I hope you do too,” he replied, glancing at her. “You know, I don’t have as many dark days as I used to, but I’m still scared of my own thoughts sometimes and the way they can turn on me. I don’t think I’ll ever be completely…fixed.”

“That’s all right,” Eve replied. “I won’t be either.”

Max’s fingers brushed against hers. “Shall we give it a try then? The greatest adventure so far?”

“The good times don’t last,” she whispered, entwining her fingers with his, squeezing them tight. “They shoot by fast and fleeting. The only hope is to enjoy it while you can.”

Max nodded. “And let it all go once it’s finished.”

Eve thought of all that lay ahead for her in this new life in the past. At some point she would need to return to 2016, to meet Friede at the shores of the lake and to have that impossible conversation with her mother. Back at the White Octopus there would be a hotel to organise, and later, the war would inevitably come, and she hated to think of Max fighting over there where she couldn’t reach him. She could send the parcels, though. They might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but after all, a single candle could make all the difference in the dark.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Max said. “You and me and the octopus.”

“I think so too,” Eve said, pouring them both another measure. “I’m never having children, though.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Max raised his glass to hers and the tumblers met with a soft clink.

Chapter 53

Max and Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1934

Music drifted softly through the Roth Suite. It spilled from an unusual music box, designed to look like a miniature grand piano with an octopus sprawled on the lid. It had its own tiny stool on which an old clockwork mouse perched, metal paws resting on the miniature keys. It had been Max’s wedding present to Eve back in 1897 and was an ever-present companion throughout the years that followed. It had played in their suite of rooms when it had been just the two of them, setting up the hotel. And it had played when Eve was first pregnant. The music had been there to soothe Harry to sleep when he was a baby, and the other two children when they arrived. The music had been there when they were a family of five—when life was bright and brilliant.

It had been there during those difficult wartime years when part of Max had longed to return to the front. To see his friends again, to maybe even try to save them. Yet he knew he had to let them go—just as Eve had released Bella—or else their life together at the White Octopus would unravel. But it was agonising, knowing that the trenches were out there, that it was happening all over again in France. He helped Eve with the packages she sent to the front sometimes. He told her about the particular records and cigars that his friends liked. It was all he could do.

The clockwork mouse played on throughout the war and the years that followed. It was still playing now, right at the end, when Eve was old and ill. She knew she wouldn’t leave her sickbed. That she’d never again sail across the lake outside or go for a sleigh ride in the mountains or sip a cocktail in the Palm Bar, and there was grief in that. Her time was finished. But it was all right, in the end. Because she’d had so much, and done so much, and loved so much. She minded that she had to go, of course she did. She would have liked a few more years. But it was harder for Max than it was for her. He was the one who was going to be left behind. Her mother too, of course.

“I know I got so much of it wrong,” Jane had said when Eve first brought her to live at the hotel all those many years ago. “But I always cared. I always loved you. And I would have followed you to the ends of the earth, if you’d asked me to.”

Jane was extremely old now, and so was Max. At last, Eve’s husband appeared just as he had when she’d first seen him in London, frail and thin, yet whenever she looked at him, Eve still saw that young musician with the dark, magnetic eyes who had fixed together the broken pieces of her soul, and been the father of her children, and throughout the years that followed there had been both good times and bad, such heartbreaking sadness and such utter joy, but there Max was throughout it all, a hand holding hers in the dark.

He was there now, by the side of the bed, both hands wrapped around Eve’s fingers and the tentacles. His head was bowed and his shoulders hunched as a single tear ran down his cheek. “I cannot bear to say goodbye,” he said.

Eve tried to squeeze his hand, but there was no strength left in her fingers. “You’ll see me again soon.”

The key to Room 7 lay ready on the dressing table, along with the octopus from the grandfather clock. Max raised Eve’s hand to his face and took in a deep, shuddering breath. “You are the great love and joy of my life,” he said. “I’ll find you again, I promise.”

He held her hand as she died, and soon after that his children were gathered about him and he was grateful for Harry, and Tristan, and Anna, glad of their young, strong arms, and the fierceness of their love, and the strength this gave him to get through the days and weeks that followed until, at last, he could face the final trip.

“Don’t cry, children,” he said as the four of them gathered outside Room 7 in the White Octopus Hotel. He felt a sense of excitement as he placed his favourite fedora on his head. At last, he was going to see Eve again, one final time. “And don’t waste a second of grief on your mother and me. Sometimes, the end is also the beginning.”

Acknowledgements

I’ve been writing professionally for almost twenty years now and The White Octopus Hotel is my twentieth published book. Of them all, no other novel means as much to me as this one.

Hotels can be special, magical, haunted places—the perfect settings for stories. I want to thank my parents for the travelling we did when I was younger and, by extension, all the amazing hotels I have been fortunate enough to stay in and be inspired by.

And though I have never stayed there because it isn’t, in fact, an operating hotel, I’d like to acknowledge the Hollywood Tower Hotel in Walt Disney World. The ghostly echoes of a bygone time made a big impression on me when I first visited at the age of twelve. It was such a thrill to feel the past haunting the present in this way—to feel so close that you could almost brush your fingers against it.

There was magic like this at Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate Street, London, too. I’m grateful that I got to visit as a child, back when Mr. Severs himself was still conducting the tours. I vividly remember feeling transfixed by the stories he told us about the house—and by his suggestion that the past is not so far away as we might imagine. It really felt as if we might step back in time at any moment—if we hadn’t already done so. All these years later, thinking of it still sends a shiver down my spine.

Of course, I have been inspired by people and stories from the First World War too, and must acknowledge the impossibility of ever comprehending what the trenches were like or of doing this subject justice. I have done my best with the material, but I’m sure that inaccuracies and inadequacies must remain.

I am grateful to my husband, Neil, whose appearance in my life transformed it. It’s a precious thing to meet someone who makes you feel like the person that you really are.

I’m thankful for my sons, Cassidy and Toby. I know I am an imperfect mother, as all mothers must surely be, but my small humans will always be the greatest joy of my life.

I owe so much to my agent, Thérèse Coen, and the wonderful team at Susanna Lea Associates, for all their work championing my books.

Thank you also to my U.K. and U.S. editors, Sam Bradbury and Anne Groell. I was so thrilled to find publishers who both offered such perfect homes for the White Octopus. Thank you for understanding what I was trying to do and for working with me to make the story the best it could be.

Many thanks as well to the rest of the Del Rey team in both the U.K. and the U.S. And to Emma Grey-Gelder and Holly MacDonald for the truly beautiful front covers.

When I do school events for my children’s books, kids often ask me whether I’ve ever met any other authors. I always enjoy telling them that I have, and that writers are incredibly supportive, honest, and generous with one another. There are many excellent writers who I count as friends, as well as plenty more who I’ve crossed paths with and have felt comforted/reassured by, or else grateful that they have accepted my socially awkward fangirling with good grace. (They say never meet your heroes, but this doesn’t apply to writers in my experience.) There are too many to mention individually here (and I’d be bound to accidentally forget someone) but you all know who you are—so thank you.

Working as a published author is an uncertain career at the best of times. I’ve experienced my share of highs and lows along the way, and I certainly never expected to last twenty years in the industry or to publish twenty books. Thank you to every single person who has ever bought one of them, or taken one from the library, or recommended one to a friend. I could not have stayed in the game for so long without you. Thank you for reading my stories and for allowing me to continue long enough to get to The White Octopus Hotel.

Photo credit Alex Dayus

Alexandra Bell studied law at university and signed her first book deal at nineteen. Since then, she has written multiple books for both adults and young people. She works at a legal advice charity and lives in Hampshire with her husband, sons, and sphynx cats.

Facebook.com/Alex_Bell86

Instagram: @Alex_Bell86

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