Summer turned into Autumn. Now the grounds were red and brown and gold. At night the hills lapped up the stars, far away across the countryside, and the white balcony rails looked like bones in the dark. The hotel breathed down its long hallways and through its chimneys, and I thought of a great lung somewhere in the hotel, filled with dust and pumping slowly like an old bellows.
I found another dead plant in Fred's garden.
I came across a dead bird in the tall grass near the jungle. It had no eyes. I poked at it with a stick and ants raced out of its eye sockets and vanished into the grass. I'd never seen a dead animal in the grounds before.
I sometimes read Joe's book – the story about the rabbits I mean, because the story about James was gone.
I'd better explain that, actually.
The last thing I read was about Joe leaving the hotel. The next time I flipped through to the back there was nothing there. I checked every night, but nothing else turned up, and eventually I stopped looking for a new chapter. I wondered why it stopped. Maybe there was nothing left to say. The black rabbit was back on the cover again, and the house was gone. After a while I began to wonder if any of it had happened. I didn't have a good memory. Sometimes I'd pick up a book from an op shop and I'd be two or three chapters in before realising I'd already read it. So I began to wonder if maybe I'd read about James in another book altogether. That the book hadn't done what it did.
I still watched the TV, even though all the guests were gone. I sat there and dialed through the channels, looking at the empty rooms and remembering what had happened in them over the years, and missing the guests.
Then the rooms began to change.
In the room where Lucio and the Ape had once played snooker, tiny shoots sprouted up from the floor. Soon they had grown into saplings. When they reached the ceiling they spread out in a canopy. The snooker table crawled with ivy. I wondered what the Ape would have thought of the room now that it was a jungle.
In Mr. and Mrs. Death's kitchen the floor and walls and ceiling began to bulge. The stove broke loose from the wall, and the chairs fell over one by one. Big buttons appeared on the walls. The wallpaper had been an old flowery pattern; now it was smart pinstripes. The walls and floor and ceiling kept bulging in further and further, and the buttons began to pop off, and I was afraid to go up there.
There had always been a narrow library on one of the channels. We never saw anybody in it. It was full of ancient books with chains hanging off them. Sophie and me had looked for it in the hotel, but we never found it – maybe it was in one of those narrow towers you could see from outside. Now the library was expanding. The walls and ceiling shuffled steadily away from each other, and as they did more bookshelves appeared, filling all the new space. Soon, all you could see was rows of books going away into the distance, and shelves going up and up to a dim and misty height.
There was an enormous room filled with machines that clanked through the night, huge machines clanking away and belching fire. The room was empty except for the machines.
There was a room that turned into a desert. Sand dunes coasted through it. It was always nighttime there, with a crescent moon in the sky. There was a stained tent like a big skin flapping in the wind. Dark, silent shapes moved across the horizon. I dreamed that I crawled into the tent and found a plate of strange foods on a rug on the floor, and I sat on the rug and ate until I was full. When I woke up I wasn't hungry.
I dreamed about the rooms more and more. After a while I couldn't remember which things I'd seen on the TV and which ones I'd dreamed. I woke up each morning with memories of howling mountains, and islands rising from the sea, and icy places at the end of the world, and I was never hungry.
I had stopped going into the city. I was worried that if I did I wouldn't be able to find the hotel again. I waited in the hotel for Sophie to come back. For Fred to appear, trotting up the stairs with Woof in one hand and a bunch of stones from the garden in the other.
I waited.