The Four-Fingered Man (2 page)

Amelia wished he’d shut up. But he was right. The hotel was a mess. Nothing like
the neat, friendly flat they’d had to sell back in the city.

Dad pulled out his mobile and grinned as though he hadn’t heard James at all. ‘I’ll
call Tom now. Let him know we’re here.’

James kicked at the gravel, and Amelia watched him, biting her lip.

It had been like this for a couple of months now: James being all rude and angry,
and even more sarcastic than usual, and Dad just letting it glide past him without
saying a word. Sometimes Amelia caught Dad shooting a look at Mum, and once she heard
Mum say, ‘That’s enough, James,’ in a voice so quiet and cool that she knew Mum was
furious. But apart from those clues … what
had
gone on at James’s school? No-one
would tell her. She had figured out that James
wasn’t
expelled, and
wasn’t
in trouble
with the police, and you would have thought that was a good thing.

You would have also thought that if James had just escaped trouble, he would have
been a bit less keen to keep looking for it, but no – ever since Whatever It Was
happened, James had been acting like he wanted to start a fight with the whole world.

‘You OK, cookie?’ Mum put an arm around her.

Amelia really wasn’t. She felt empty and miserable, but there wasn’t much point saying
so. She just nodded, and let Mum wrap her up in a hug.

‘No reception!’ Dad said, shaking his mobile and finally sounding less than a thousand
per cent excited.

‘Ha!’ a voice barked out so suddenly, and so close behind them, that Amelia jumped.
‘You won’t get any reception around here!’

An old man in a tatty, checked shirt was limping across the grass towards them. A
black patch covered one of his eyes, and an ancient black cap with the words ‘Forgotten
Bay’ embroidered on the front was pulled low on his forehead.

‘There’s a natural cave system that runs under the whole headland here,’ he went
on, grinning at them all so widely, Amelia saw gold teeth glinting at the back. ‘Don’t
really understand why, but something down there in the caves messes with electronics.
You’ll have a hard time tuning a radio, far less a TV, and you can forget about using
a mobile.’

‘Brilliant,’ said James. ‘No wonder it’s called Forgotten Bay.’

Amelia
almost
felt sorry for her brother. He was taking a university-level unit in
electronic engineering at school, and whenever he wasn’t chatting online to his friends
or rewriting the operating system on their computer, he was working on his engineering
course project. With no electronics here, James would have nothing.

Then Amelia realised it wasn’t James she should feel sorry for – if he couldn’t have
his gadgets, computers and constant superfast broadband, James wouldn’t suffer alone.
He’d make sure everyone else suffered along with him.

Tom turned to Dad. ‘Sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. I had some … business that
kept me.’

‘No worries!’ Dad bounced right back to cheerful again. ‘We’ve only been here long
enough to stretch our legs.’ He reached over to Tom and held out his hand in greeting.
‘Scott Walker.’

As Tom gripped Dad’s hand and shook it, Amelia saw that something was wrong with
the caretaker’s fingers. The shake was quick, and Tom put his hand back in his pocket
too fast for Amelia to get a second look, but there was
something
…

‘This is my wife, Skye,’ Dad went on. ‘And the kids, James and Amelia.’

Tom nodded. ‘Let’s get you inside, then. I think Lady Naomi is out already, so don’t
worry about making noise.’

‘Lady who?’ asked Amelia.

‘She must be the standing booking,’ Mum said. ‘How long has she been staying here?’

A strange, distant look passed over Tom’s face. ‘Oh, err, quite a while now,’ he
said, rifling through a tool belt that seemed to have more springs and wires in it
than screwdrivers or pliers. He pulled out a huge bunch of keys, and Amelia tried
to watch without obviously staring. ‘But she keeps to herself mostly. Busy with her
research project.’

‘Should’ve researched herself a better place to stay,’ said James, as Tom flicked
through the keys one by one.

Tom mustn’t have heard. ‘Lady N will come and go, but she’s no trouble at all. Not
like some guests, eh?’ He cracked a strange grin at Dad. ‘Ah, here it is!’

Tom held a huge brass key and limped up the steps to the double doors of the main
entrance. He fumbled with the lock, then gave the door a rough shove with the palm
of his right hand. Amelia blinked.

The door swung open with a creak.

‘After you,’ said Tom, and ushered the Walkers into their new home.

Amelia stepped past Tom to go into the hotel, flinching a little. Whatever it was
about the hotel that creeped her out, Tom had it in bucketloads.

If possible, the inside of the place was even dustier, dirtier and more dishevelled
than the outside. Old, darkened oil paintings hung on the walls in heavy gold frames.
Two huge stone staircases rose up from the lobby floor, one curving around to the
left wing of the hotel, the other to the right, and in the middle, a giant chandelier
hung over them like a crystal deathtrap, just waiting for someone to loosen the pin
that held it to its chain. It was amazing that anything so rich and elegant could
look so spooky and foul at the same time.

‘Thank goodness we’ve got Mary coming on Monday,’ said Mum. ‘This is far more than
the quick vacuum and coat of paint you promised, Scott.’

Dad scratched the back of his neck and smiled awkwardly.

But Amelia wasn’t listening. She was remembering Tom’s hand pushing open the front
door. She had finally realised what was wrong with it.

One of his fingers was missing.

‘Aaargh!’

Metal crashed to the ground, followed by the sound of shattering glass. There was
a moment’s silence, and then Dad called out, ‘I’m OK!’

Amelia and James looked at each other. James rolled his eyes. Amelia yawned hugely.
She thought she’d been exhausted yesterday, but that was nothing compared to how
she felt after her first night sleeping in the hotel. Or
not
sleeping.

She’d had to drag herself down to breakfast in the staff common room, a cosy, almost
normal-looking room off the hotel’s huge kitchen. It was the only room Amelia had
seen so far that wasn’t either enormous (the kitchen, the ballroom, the library)
or crammed full of shabby antiques and half-ruined heirlooms (the dining room, the
lounge, the main bedrooms), or both.

Sitting with James, eating cereal around the ordinary pine table from their old flat,
Amelia could pretend she was at home. Except for the plates and plates of food crowding
out their cereal bowls, that is. Bumping up against each other were dishes of grey,
watery scrambled eggs, fried eggs with bits of shell cooked into the whites, French
toast that was amazingly burnt and raw at the same time, greasy bacon strips …

Amelia shuddered and turned back to her cornflakes. She didn’t want to hurt Dad’s
feelings, but it was too early in the day for her to deal with his breakfast menu
experiments.

There was another shriek from the kitchen, and the gush of a fire extinguisher discharging.
Amelia paused with her spoon in midair. The smoke alarms began to screech.

‘Well, at least we know
something
works,’ said Amelia, covering her ears.

‘Whose idea was it for Dad to be the cook?’ James sighed, poking warily at a blueberry
muffin with liquid batter oozing out of the berry holes.

The alarms cut off and Amelia put her hands down. ‘Not mine,’ she said. ‘I always
thought he was supposed to be really good at his old job. I don’t know why he thought
this would be better.’

James nodded. ‘I asked Mum if Dad had been fired, and that’s why we had to come here.’

Amelia’s eyes widened. She’d been so sure this move from the city had been about
James, it hadn’t occurred to her there might be another reason. ‘Dad was fired?’

‘Mum said no. Actually, she said this is a kind of promotion for Dad.’

Amelia stared at him. That made no sense at all.

Dad was a scientist. He worked in a government lab with gigantic computers and telescopes
and machines that studied outer space, and dozens of assistants who talked about
ideas so insanely complicated that it was like they were speaking another language.
So how did moving out to the edge of nowhere and burning eggs for a living make sense
as a
promotion
?

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.