The Four-Fingered Man

by Cerberus Jones

  Mum burst in through the door. ‘What’s happening? Fire?’

  James just pointed towards the door on the other side of the room. ‘Dad.’

  Mum sighed. Amelia couldn’t tell if it was relief or exasperation.

  ‘Scott?’ she called. ‘Do you need help?’

  Dad popped his head around the kitchen door. ‘I’m fine!’ He waved happily. A tea towel was wrapped around his hand, and Amelia saw that it was blotched with blood. ‘Just learning the ropes.’

  Mum raised her eyebrows, and followed Dad into the kitchen. ‘Come on, then. Tell me what you’ve done to your hand.’

  Amelia looked at James. ‘Definitely wasn’t a promotion for Mum.’

  James shook his head in agreement. Mum had had to quit her job as a diplomat to come here. And she loved being a diplomat.

  There was another strange noise – this time a low, groaning buzz that came from the front of the hotel.

  Mum poked her head out, puzzled. ‘What was that? Oh!’ Her face cleared. ‘The doorbell. It must need a new battery.’

  After Tom’s comment the day before, Amelia had been worried the hotel had no electricity at all. She’d been dreading (silently, of course, no need to tell anyone) a night in a deserted hotel with only candlelight, but it turned out the electricity was running fine. Simple things like the lights and hot water and the toaster worked without a hitch, but just as Tom had warned, anything more complicated – a computer, microwave, even a bedside clock – seemed to act very weirdly.

  James had tried all night to text his friends, testing different locations around the hotel, going out in the garden, even climbing onto the roof, but in the end he’d given up.

  Mum walked out to the lobby, and there was an ominous creak as she opened the main doors to the hotel. Amelia stayed where she was. She had enough new things to think about without seeing who was at the door.

  Five seconds later, though, a boy about her age exploded through the common room door, bellowing, ‘Whoa! This place is awesome!’

  James just stared at him, like he was way too cool and grown-up to respond, but Amelia couldn’t help grinning.

  ‘Charlie!’ called a voice from outside. ‘Slow down! Where are you?’

  Mum came back in to the common room with another woman, just as Dad wandered out of the kitchen. Somehow, his trousers were now wet to the knees and he had flour in his hair.

  When he saw the boy and his mum, he smiled cheerfully. ‘Hello, you caught me making bread.’

  ‘Scott,’ said Mum. ‘This is Mary Floros, and her son, Charlie.’ She turned to Amelia and James. ‘Mary’s going to be helping us around the hotel.’

  ‘Hey!’ Charlie sat himself down next to Amelia, and before she could warn him he took a cinnamon roll. He bit into it, crinkled up his nose in surprise, and then shrugged and kept chewing.

  The adults wandered off to Mum’s office to talk business.

  ‘Hi,’ said Amelia, quietly. ‘I’m Amelia, and this is –’

  ‘James,’ said Charlie, muffled by the half a roll in his mouth. ‘Yeah, I know. Mum told me.’ He grabbed her arm, swallowed hard and said, ‘I can’t believe he’s real!’

  ‘Who?’ said Amelia. ‘James?’

  ‘No!’ Charlie snorted. ‘The caretaker! The old guy with the eye-patch! We passed him on the driveway. Oh man, I thought he was just a story!’

  ‘That’s Tom,’ said Amelia.

  ‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘Well, I mean, if that’s even his real name.’

  ‘Did you see his hand?’ Amelia asked, pulling a face. ‘He’s missing a finger – creepy.’

  ‘So creepy,’ Charlie sighed happily. ‘I can’t believe you get to live here. Have you explored everything yet?’ He gave up on the cinnamon roll and dropped it into a bowl of porridge.

  ‘No, we’ve only been here a day. We picked our rooms, unpacked the car, and then the trucks arrived with all our boxes, and –’

  ‘So let’s go!’ Charlie interrupted, standing up suddenly. ‘I saw a bunch of hedges out there. I bet they’re an old maze! I love mazes! I mean, I’ve never been in one, but I bet I love them!’

  James grunted. ‘Good idea. Get out of the house for a while.’

  Amelia spotted the look on her brother’s face. She could always tell when he was up to something, and this time she was pretty sure she knew what. James wanted to lurk around the house and see what Lady Naomi looked like.

  Hoo boy …

  Back home, James had fallen in love with plenty of girls just by looking at them. As far as Amelia knew, though, this was the first time he’d fallen in love with a girl just from the sound of her name.

  ‘You know,’ Amelia said quietly to her brother, ‘Lady Naomi could turn out to be a hundred years old. With warts.’

  ‘Lady who?’ said Charlie.

  James glowered at them both.

  Amelia got up from the table. ‘Hey, how about that maze, Charlie?’

  ‘Heck yeah!’ Charlie was already bounding to the door. ‘See ya, James.’

  Amelia laughed as she ran after him. Charlie seemed kind of nuts, but he was definitely going to be fun to have around. Maybe she wouldn’t feel quite so worried or spooked by the hotel with him charging about the place.

  They ran together through the lobby, and for the first time since they’d arrived, the booming echo of footsteps in the empty space didn’t feel lonely. They were just sprinting at full pelt through the doors, about to leap off the top step of the veranda to the driveway below, when Charlie’s mum let out a piercing whistle.

  Charlie stopped dead. ‘Oh, man.’

  Amelia saw all three parents wander out of the hotel.

  ‘Time to go, Charlie,’ his mum called.

  ‘But we only just got here!’

  ‘And we don’t start until tomorrow, so why don’t we give Amelia and her family some time to themselves?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Charlie, I’ll be working here every day of the week, and you’ll be coming here every day after school with Amelia, but that won’t start until tomorrow.’

  Charlie heaved a sigh. ‘OK. See you in class tomorrow, Amelia.’

  ‘How do you know we’ll be in the same class?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Charlie. ‘Of course we’ll be in the same class. You’ll see.’

  ‘Dad!’ Amelia yelled out the door. ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want to take this picture down. I don’t like it in my room.’

  Amelia heard Dad’s footsteps on the staircase outside. She took a deep breath and looked around her new bedroom, cluttered with all her half-unpacked bags and the boxes with her name on them.

  The room was more than twice as big as her old one, with a big bay window that jutted out over the hotel grounds like the bow of a boat. The window had a seat built into it, and when she sat there she could see over one side of the headland, the bush, and out to the sea beyond. With enough cushions, it would be like sitting in a cloud.

  Her old bed was on the other side of the room. In the far corner, Dad had shoved the original bed against the wall – an antique four-poster bed, with carved columns and faded pink and green curtains, but no mattress. Dad had promised they would get a new mattress for it and wash the curtains so Amelia could use it.

  ‘When we get settled,’ Mum had added. Whatever that meant.

  Anyway, it was a good room, and it had the potential to be a great room. The only thing Amelia didn’t like was the giant old portrait on the wall. It was of a lady in old-fashioned clothes, who somehow managed to look kind and gentle and vaguely sinister all at the same time.

  The place had felt much worse last night. The hotel was OK in the daytime, with sun pour
ing in through the windows and birds singing like everything was right in the world. In the dark, though, in a room filled with unfamiliar shadows, the hotel had been a very freaky place indeed. Last night, Amelia had lain awake in bed for hours, listening to things gnawing in the walls and wild animals fighting in the ceilings. To tell the truth, she’d kept the light on all night.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dad, appearing in the doorway. ‘Matilda Swervingthorpe.’

  ‘Who?’ said Amelia.

  ‘Her,’ said Dad, pointing at the painting. ‘She was the original owner of this place, back before it was a hotel.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Amelia. ‘She looks ancient. She didn’t, uh, die here or anything, did she? Like, in this room …?’

  Not that she believed in ghosts.

  ‘What? Oh, no, she definitely didn’t die here.’

  There was something odd about the way Dad said that.

  Amelia asked, ‘Definitely not here? Why? Where did she die?’

  ‘Well … that’s kind of a funny story, actually,’ Dad said. He kept his back to her and heaved the painting off the wall, leaving behind a rectangle of wallpaper that was still fresh and colourful compared the rest of the walls. A couple of dried-out gum leaves fell away and fluttered to the ground. ‘It turns out no-one’s quite sure what happened to Matilda. She seems to have gone missing.’

  ‘Missing?’ said Amelia, who didn’t see how that was funny at all. ‘What do you mean –’

  But then another mystery pulled her attention. As Dad set the picture down on the floor, Amelia saw that he had also uncovered a small metal door, set into the wall. It had been hidden behind the painting just like a safe in a cartoon.

  ‘Ooh, look!’ said Dad. ‘We might have treasure in here.’ He tried the handle. ‘Locked, of course. I wonder if we can find the combination. I’ll ask Tom.’

  ‘No!’ Amelia blurted.

  Dad looked at her curiously. ‘You don’t want me to ask Tom?’

  Amelia winced. Dad seemed to think Tom was a ‘character’. She didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t trust Tom. You couldn’t exactly blame someone for having an eye patch, or missing a finger, or walking with a limp, or for being really old, or having gold teeth, and Amelia knew you should never judge people for how they looked, but …

  Well, sorry, but Tom was just creepy.

  ‘Um,’ she stalled. ‘I just need to get my room sorted out first. I guess the door can wait …’

  Wait until Dad forgot about asking Tom, that is.

  ‘All right,’ said Dad. ‘Suit yourself.’ He hefted the portrait in both hands. Grunting under the weight of the painting, Dad shuffled sideways out of the room.

  Amelia shivered and went back to her bed. Outside, it was a perfect day. Too good to be stuck in here really, no matter how much unpacking Mum wanted her to get through.

  Amelia was feeling a bit flat since Charlie had left. She wasn’t the sort of kid who made friends that easily – back home, she’d always needed a while to warm up and get comfortable with people before she could relax and just hang out. But here, where everything around her was a combination of old, dirty, broken and spooky, Charlie had been the only part that looked cheerful and uncomplicated.

  She lay back on her bed and gazed at the cobwebs on the ceiling, wishing she could go to sleep and let the rest of the day pass by without her. It was so quiet here – no traffic, no sounds of construction sites or kids yelling at the skate park – nothing but the dull wash of the surf on the cliffs below, and the buzzing of a fly against the window.

  And a creak of wooden floorboards.

  She sat up in bed, her heart hammering. She peered out of her window in time to see a dark shape emerge from under the far end of the veranda. It was Tom. She watched him limp down the stairs, then cross the lawns, heading down the hill towards those dark, towering trees.

  Amelia had seen him come and go a few times already today. She was surprised he hadn’t worn a path as he hurried back and forth. He never seemed to stay long at the hotel. Once he was carrying a box draped in an old sack; once he talked in quiet tones to Mum; and a couple of other times Amelia only saw him as he was leaving. But no matter how many times Amelia saw him, the uneasy hitch in her stomach never wore off.

  Tom had said his cottage was hidden back there among the trees somewhere, so it made sense he was going in that direction. It even made sense that he would have been hanging around the hotel. That was his job after all, right?

  But something in the way Tom kept appearing and disappearing, always in a hurry, made Amelia nervous. She slid off her bed and tiptoed to the bay window. She held her breath, although there was no way Tom could hear her from all the way down there. No way at all.

  Which was why she let out a little scream of surprise when he suddenly looked back over his shoulder and stared up at the window, straight into her eyes.

  Amelia dropped to the floor, and lay crouched beside the bay-window seat, panting in shock and fear. How had he known she was there? And worse: had she just made an enemy of him?

  She was still lying there, shaking, when Dad walked back in.

  ‘Amelia, I – where are you? Oh, hello, you funny thing. What are you doing down there?’

  ‘I – um … I –’ Amelia sat up and tried to slow her breathing. ‘Dad.’ She came to a decision. ‘Dad, I just saw Tom out my window. He’d been at the hotel, and he was rushing away, and he looked at me.’

  Dad took a step back. ‘He looked at you? What do you mean? When?’

  ‘Just then. Out the window.’

  ‘You mean, you were up here, and he was down there, and then he looked at you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While you were looking at him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK,’ Dad laughed. ‘Well, as Gran used to say, a cat can look at a king. Now about your other crisis – those wild animals you heard in the roof last night. Look!’

  He held up a box of rat poison and a massive trap. ‘Ta-daa!’

  ‘Eww! Dad! In my room?’

  Somehow, when Dad sorted things out for Amelia, she usually felt worse.

  Amelia’s stomach was starting to growl for dinner when the doorbell chimed brightly. Maybe Tom had actually done a real job and fetched batteries for them.

  Amelia pushed aside the box she was sorting through and went out to the rail that ran around the upper gallery, overlooking the lobby and front doors. Mum was smoothing down her shirt as she walked to answer the door.

  ‘Is it pizza?’ Amelia called.

  Mum jumped slightly, then grinned up at Amelia. ‘No, our first guest!’

  ‘But –’

  Mum put a finger to her lips. ‘Shh!’

  Amelia had been about to say, But we’re not open yet. Fair enough if Mum didn’t want the guest to hear that, although it wouldn’t take them very long to figure it out. There were still cobwebs dangling from all the lights, and dust bunnies the size of actual bunnies under all the furniture.

  Mum opened the door with a flourish. ‘Welcome to the Gateway Hotel!’

  A tall woman dressed in shimmering purple and green robes stepped into the lobby, peering anxiously from side to side as though shortsighted. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice the mess, then. Her head was covered with an intricately patterned scarf, and Amelia saw chunky beads of different colours flashing at her neck and wrist.

  Wow. Who was this woman? She reminded Amelia of a movie star or a princess – and not a boring actual princess, but a fairytale princess – someone who belonged in a castle with a moat. Amelia leant out further over the railing, and the woodwork let out a creak.

  Downstairs, the woman flinched and looked up towards Amelia with an expression that seemed terrified. She squi
nted, and then, when she realised Amelia was just a kid, the woman took a breath and smiled. An incredibly fake smile. She was clearly freaking out.

  Mum smiled very warmly, and said, ‘You must be Elizabeth Ardman. I’m Skye, the manager here. Can I help you with your luggage?’

  Miss Ardman pulled back in alarm, and clutched to her chest the only piece of luggage she had – an old-fashioned leather case, about the size of a bowling bag. ‘No!’

  Mum just kept smiling, totally relaxed. ‘Of course. Well, let me show you your room. We’re in quite a mess as you can see, but I can assure you, Miss Ardman …’

  Mum kept quietly talking on, saying nothing much, but in such a friendly, soothing tone that Miss Ardman began to calm down.

  ‘Please, call me Liz,’ Amelia heard the guest say, and she was reminded again what an awesome diplomat Mum must have been.

  Mum led Miss Ardman up the right-hand stairs, past Lady Naomi’s room and so far down the corridor that Amelia could no longer see them. She was just turning to go back to her own room when she saw that the main door downstairs was ajar. Had Mum left it like that? Amelia tried to remember whether it had been properly closed after Miss Ardman came in.

  She was about to go downstairs to close it herself when something moved in the darkness outside the door. What she had assumed to be the black of the night sky was actually a shadow – no, a shape. Somebody was out there, their whole body pressed into the gap in the door.

  The door eased open a little wider and a face pushed through, looking up the stairs as if trying to see where Mum and Miss Ardman had gone.

  Amelia saw his jaw clench, his brow furrow, as he stared after Miss Ardman with strange intensity.

  It was Tom.