Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 14.5

That was how we found ourselves up on the fifth floor. We brought Fred with us. Fred liked adventures. I gave him a hammer to carry. Sophie had a crowbar. My backpack was full of old tools from the shed. We didn't know what we might need, or if we would need anything at all, so we brought half the shed with us. I told Fred we were going looking for a hobgoblin. He didn't ask me what a hobgoblin was. He called it a hobgobber. I wondered what he thought it was.

It was very quiet on the upper floors of the hotel. We hadn't been up so high since Elinor took Fred. I was surprised by how dark and narrow and twisty the halls were. Well, we'd been in a rush that time, maybe we hadn't noticed.

"Which room number are they?" I said when we got to the black floor.

Sophie shrugged. We'd never seen the outside of the Deaths' room on the TV, and they never wrote to us like Lucio did.

"I wonder what happened to all the keys?" I said. I was thinking about the board down in the office with all the hooks and numbers on it.

"Hobgobber," said Fred, and gave the floor a test thump with his hammer.

I started trying the doors.

"You can't just burst in," Sophie said. "What if they're doing it?"

"How can I burst in? None of them're open."

"Benjamin, you are so rude."

"Am fucking not."

"Hobgobber?" said Fred.

"Okay I'll knock if it's such a problem. Jesus." I knocked on the next door along. It was more of a thump than a knock really, because I was annoyed at Sophie. Anyway, I hit the door hard enough for it to swing open. "Oh," I said.

Sophie came up next to me and looked inside.

"See?" I said, pointing into the room. "Nobody's doing it."

Nobody was doing anything in the room. It was empty.

"They must have gone out," Sophie said.

If the Deaths had gone out, it had been a long time ago. The kitchen had that fusty, closed-up smell like a cupboard nobody opens. I could see a pile of broken plates and glasses on the floor near the stove. I wondered why it had been swept it into a pile but nobody had bothered to pick it up with a dustpan and put it in the bin.

Another strange thing: the table they'd broken was standing right there in the middle of the kitchen, and it wasn't broken at all. I pointed at it.

Sophie frowned.

Fred was opening cupboards and peering inside for the hobgoblin.

"The table's not broken," I said, just in case that wasn't obvious.

"Maybe they fixed it," Sophie said.

"Or they haven't broken it yet."

"What?"

But Sophie was right. When I got down to look under the table I could see that two of the legs had been repaired. There were some metal plates screwed into the bit where the legs joined the tabletop, and I could see a big crack in the wood that had been glued back together. I stood up and ran my finger along the tabletop and it left a line in the dust that had settled there. I held up my dusty finger to Sophie. She frowned again and turned to the door that led into the bedroom. Me and Fred followed her in.

The bedroom was empty too. Fred crawled under the big bed and made some hammering sounds. Sophie went through the drawers in the bedside tables. She found a Bible and a notepad and some pens. I checked out the cupboards, but all I could see was a few coat-hangers and one of those funny-smelling things that I think are for keeping moths away.

There was another door. It led to a bathroom. Also empty. There was a frosted glass window above the sink, but I couldn't open it.

"Well?" I said as I came back into the bedroom.

Sophie didn't answer. She was sitting on the bed with the notepad in her lap, scribbling away on it. Fred was still hammering away under the bed.

"What're you doing?" I said.

"Shut up Fred," Sophie said, ignoring me.

The hammer emerged from beneath the bed, followed by Fred.

"I'm leaving them a note," Sophie said.

"Why?"

"So they'll know we were here."

I was about to start arguing with her, but then I wondered what was the point? If there's one thing I know about girls, it's that it's pointless arguing with them once they've made up their minds.

So that was it. Sophie left the note on the kitchen table and we went back downstairs.

After that I kind of forgot about The Deaths, and Sophie stopped talking about them. We didn't see them on TV anymore either. I don't think Sophie stopped believing that Death had caused the deaths of the Ape and all those people in Japan, but with each day that passed it became more and more distant, like something we'd only read about. That's what happens: people forget things. And sometimes those things are important.