Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“Are they the ones shaped like breasts?” asked Yeoman.

“Not breasts, octopuses,” said Mandeville, smiling.

“Whatever,” said Yeoman, also smiling. “They look like tits to me.”

“They’re supposed to,” said Parry. “The third floor suites are all about sexuality, about sex and it being the driving force in nature. Octopuses suited Gravette because he could mould the taps to look like their bodies and still have it represent the female form. Priest’s form, to be precise. His own form was there in the long lines of the taps’ stems. It’s all over, the male and female, Gravette and Priest. This whole place is a shrine to them, to their love.”

“Did they really fuck in every room on the third floor before the hotel opened?” asked Yeoman, which made Parry grin broadly.

“That’s the rumour. They called it ‘christening the hotel’, according to Manning’s diary.”

“What else?” asked Mandeville, bringing back the discussion to the hotel’s current state, knowing that Parry could happily talk about the history of a place for hours, and that Yeoman would encourage him just because he could.

“The first floor sun deck is pretty solid,” said Yeoman. “I went up after I got the camp sorted. It’s just a reinforced roof space, but the walls have still got designs etched into them. Waves, by the look of it, although I’m fairly sure I made out fish and fins and things like that. It’s pretty faded.”

“That was Manning,” said Parry, checking a sheet. “He worked with Gravette and Priest pretty closely, but he didn’t do much in the way of decoration. It’s good that the sun deck still exists; it’ll probably be the only bit by him left that isn’t the actual structure. He was a big believer in the energising power of the sun, though, and the bracing sea atmosphere, and insisted on having his own designs in the area of the sun lounge.

“Can you imagine all those rich men and their wives lying on stripy deckchairs in the chilly British summer? Overlooked by the people on the second and third floor?”

“Was he another mucky one?” asked Yeoman.

“No,” said Parry, not hearing the humour in Yeoman’s voice; Yeoman knew all this, he just wanted Parry to talk. “He was tightly buttoned by all accounts, but got on surprisingly well with Gravette and Priest. They believed in the same things, ultimately, in the human body and the power of the natural world. They liked fucking, he liked sunbathing.”

“So where do we concentrate?”

“We need a full inventory,” said Parry, “but the third floor’s the least changed. There’s panels covering the walls between the room doors, which might mean they were protecting artwork. The contemporary reports aren’t very clear about what was actually done to protect the art, and I didn’t want to remove a panel without help.”

Mandeville made a note on his work plan. Gravette had designed and created two large murals, one for the reception and one for the restaurant, which depicted scenes of men, women, animals and machines existing in verdant landscapes of greens and blues. Both were gone, although his smaller pieces were hopefully still inset into the third floor corridor walls. Mirroring the stations of the cross, the fourteen small panels showed mythological scenes re-imagined so that in every piece the nude figures of gods and people moved around animals and plants. It would be a real bonus if the fourteen still existed and could be restored and incorporated into the new decorative scheme. Tomorrow , he thought. We start finding out tomorrow .

Mandeville couldn’t sleep. It was partly that his camp bed was uncomfortable and that both Parry and Yeoman snored, but it was also excitement; the Grand was the most important job the Crew had ever taken on, and it could make their reputation.

Most of their other work had been in helping homeowners discover the histories of the buildings they lived in and to carry out refits and rebuilds taking this history into account, but the Grand was a step into the next league. The art alone, even if only a part of it could be rescued, would add to their understanding of how art had changed and grown between the wars, and the building itself was, in design and construction, almost unique and certainly one of the few surviving examples of its type.

Restless, he walked through to the sun corridor but could see little through the glass. He heard the sound of the ocean crouched in the darkness, muted and elastic like the breathing of some huge animal at rest. It was cold and he pulled his coat tightly around him, watching as his breath misted on the glass in front of him, bleeding to odd colours because the thin coating of paint smeared across the inside of the panes.

I forgot to ask Parry about that , he thought briefly and made a mental note to do so before they started work tomorrow. When he played the narrow beam of his penlight across the pane, the smears of paint were clearer than they had been in daylight. For a moment, he couldn’t tell what the smears reminded him of, and then it came to him; it looked as though the windows were covered in hundreds of handprints.

Yeoman whistled as he worked, and knew that his whistle would reach throughout the building. At some point in the near future, Parry would go and turn on the radio that was sitting on the floor in the middle of the foyer to drown him out, but for now he was enjoying the idea that something of him was filling this place, swooping along the corridors and entering the rooms, tuneless and sharp though it may be.

Parry was somewhere on the first floor, he thought, and Mandeville was recording the art that remained on the ground floor, noting the missing or badly repaired sections of Priest’s tiled floor on which they slept at night.

Yeoman himself was in the bar that emerged from the rear of the building over the restaurant. Panels of dark wood, designed but not carved by Gravette, lined the walls, many were warping and sagging, and he was trying to ascertain whether the problem lay with the walls themselves or simply the panels. His initial thought was that it was the panels; each was hanging loose from the walls, the wood twisting and buckled so that the figures carved on their fronts (barely seen workmen, faceless automata, things that might have been gods or giants standing above them and all around the edges animals and fish) seemed hunched and wretched.

As he leaned in to get a better look at the wall, Yeoman placed his hand on one of the panels, holding it steady away from the wall so that he could angle his torch into the space behind it. The concrete seemed fine; dank, certainly, covered mould spores that probably indicated some minor damp problems, but essentially sound and with no sign of cracking.

He started back from the wall, pushing his hand against the panel for leverage, and was alarmed to feel it give around his fingers. The wood, oddly soft, separated and his fingers descended into the warm and damp wood.

Warm? Everything else in the hotel was cold and damp. Yeoman pulled, but his hand didn’t come free from the panel and he pulled again, laughing as he thought of Mandeville’s face when he told him that he’d accidentally pushed his fingers through a piece of artwork.

The wood felt tight around his fingertips, still warm, but there were splinters in there as well, sharp and needling. He pulled again and then, when his fingers still were not released, he pulled a last, forceful, time.

Mandeville had gridded and completely mapped the floor in the restaurant and was taking a rest. His eyes ached from trying to plot the precise positions of the missing or replaced tiles, almost two hundred of them, on a copy of Priest’s original plans. It was a job made more difficult because, in the bright sunlight, the pattern, despite its disruptions, seemed to swirl in a constant half-seen movement, black eyes and mouths forming at the corner of his vision and then breaking up again, only to reform moments later.