Felicity insisted on walking them all down to breakfast the next morning.
“I think I have the route worked out now,” she said, squinting anxiously at the wallpaper. “Just remind me to take a left at the wall sconce with the chipped shade, okay? That tripped me up yesterday.”
Shenanigan hadn’t been paying much attention to the Hôtel’s interior the night before, and was confused how Felicity could get lost on her way downstairs. But that soon became apparent. They seemed to walk a mile of endless, twisting carpet and faded wallpaper, taking odd turns, doubling back, trying to follow the faint sounds of cutlery clinking in the restaurant. Felicity kept one hand touching the wall, as if frightened she would lose her bearings.
And yet, when they finally reunited with Inheritance and Maelstrom, collapsing into their seats for breakfast as if they had undertaken a grand voyage instead of coming down two floors, there was no sign of Soufflé. Though they waited over an hour, the manager failed to appear as promised. It was hard to see what could be keeping him so busy. Apart from a business-person or two and a pair of dazed-looking honeymooners, the Hôtel seemed empty.
“It’s the off-season,” said Mercredi when they mentioned this. She was in the middle of checking in an American tourist, though this didn’t seem to deter her from talking to them.
“Then surely Soufflé should have plenty of free time,” said Inheritance. “What’s keeping him?”
“He takes long breakfasts. Do you want a wake-up call or not?” Mercredi snapped at the new guest.
“Ah…no?” he said.
Next to Wake-Up Call Mercredi wrote 5:30 a.m.
“Souris will take you up to Soufflé’s office when he’s ready.”
“I’m sorry?” said the guest.
“Not you.”
“Can’t we just go up ourselves?” asked Inheritance.
“The elevator needs a key to go up to the Management Suite on the sixth floor,” Mercredi replied with exaggerated patience. “Souris has that key. That is why I told you to wait for him.”
“Excuse me?” said the guest, looking flustered.
“I’m talking,” Mercredi snapped. “Here’s your key, anyway, and a whistle in case you get lost. Enjoy your stay.”
It sounded like a threat, and the man left hurriedly. Mercredi leaned back in her chair, smiling in satisfaction. “People like hotel staff to be rude,” she explained. “They think, This place must be very fancy if they can afford to speak to me like that.”
Shenanigan was sure that couldn’t be right, but the man did look impressed as he climbed the stairs, staring at his key as if it was an honor to be allowed in the building. Still, she couldn’t help but notice that many of the room keys were still on their hooks behind the front desk. As she idly counted the empty rooms, she noticed something else—an old-fashioned gilt frame, with a slash diagonally across the middle like a No Smoking sign. Instead of a cigarette, there was the silhouette of a clown.
“Hôtel policy,” said Mercredi, following Shenanigan’s gaze. She pointed to the window, where a row of mournful, white-painted faces were pressed against the glass. “Their beloved Pierrot used to live here before it was a hotel. We usually get one or two hanging around, but now they’re flooding into the city to see the exhibition and they all want to check in. It’s a nightmare.”
Maelstrom frowned. “But they’d be paying customers. Don’t you…want those?”
Mercredi shrugged, watching as one of the clowns pushed against the glass until his nose flattened. “As I said, Hôtel policy. They’re more trouble than they’re worth, anyway, annoying the other guests and getting greasepaint on everything. They’d cost us a fortune in cleaning.”
“Well, I for one am not going to be treated like a clown, or a—a tourist!” said Inheritance, and Shenanigan saw the gleam in her eye that meant she was about to make someone’s life ever-so-slightly more annoying. “I am the Swift Family Archivist! I won’t be snubbed like this! I’m going to find Soufflé myself!”
She marched up the curving stairs, muttering. Mercredi watched her go with obvious amusement.
“You’d better go after her,” she said to Maelstrom. “This place is a maze.”
“I’m sure she can find her way,” said Maelstrom.
“You think so? Last week we had a guest three days late to check out. It had taken him that long to find the front desk. Besides, the stairs only go up as far as the fourth floor.”
“What about us?” demanded Shenanigan as Maelstrom hurried off to keep Inheritance from causing a diplomatic incident, or possibly dying of thirst. “What are we supposed to do?”
Mercredi shrugged again, picking up her book. “I don’t care. You could sit here quietly and contemplate the mysteries of life,” she suggested.
They tried. They lasted four minutes.
“So…a table is female,” said Erf, frowning at their phrase book, “and a chair is female. But a desk is male?”
“Yes,” said Mercredi tiredly. “La table, la chaise, le bureau. La is feminine, le is masculine.”
Erf’s frown deepened. “Huh.”
“Spanish is the same,” added Shenanigan, idly picking up one of the exhibition leaflets from the front desk and folding it into a paper airplane. “La and le. Cook says it’s something to do with languages that have their roots in Latin.”
“Is the rule the same for people?” Erf looked a little unsure, so Shenanigan bumped their shoulder with hers for support.
“Yes,” said Mercredi. “And the words themselves change too. A male friend is an ami, or copain; a female friend is an amie, or copine—”
“What about people who aren’t either male or female, though?” asked Erf. “I’m non-binary, but there’s nothing in my phrase book about it. The only pronouns are ‘il’ for ‘he’ and ‘elle’ for ‘she.’ ”
Mercredi’s habitual expression of irritation lifted. “Ah. Your phrase book is probably out of date. French is as complicated as any other language, and we’re still figuring the nouns out, but for neutral pronouns ‘iel’ is popular. Cousin Jardin uses it.”
“Sounds like ‘yell’?” asked Erf, trying it out. “Il, elle, iel. Their name is Erf. Iel s’appelle Erf.”
“That’s it,” said Mercredi. The corner of her mouth twitched up. “Though if you’re going to start referring to yourself in the third person, Mercredi reserves the right to roll her eyes.”
“Erf understands completely,” said Erf solemnly, “and thanks Mercredi for her help.”
Mercredi snorted, but then Shenanigan’s attempt to snag another leaflet led to her knocking the entire display to the floor, and the irritated expression was back.
“Speaking of help,” she murmured, “I think I’ve figured out what to do with you.” She grabbed the receiver from the wall. “Souris? I have four new employees ready for orientation.”
The Swift children stood in a line, picking at their new uniforms. Phenomena had refused to take off her lab coat. Erf’s cap kept slipping over their eyes, unable to find purchase on their new haircut. Shenanigan’s waistcoat was fine, but Erf had taken the only trousers in their size, and so Shenanigan had a pair much too big for her, rolled up at the ankles. Felicity kept complaining that pistachio wasn’t really her favorite green, and did they have anything in emerald or a nice chartreuse?
Like a general surveying his troops, Souris marched down the line, eyeing them critically. Shenanigan eyed him right back. He and his sister resembled each other, with the same brown skin and pointed chin, though his dark and curly hair suggested that lilac was not Mercredi’s natural shade. His bellboy’s cap was held up by a pair of large ears, and his bright, cheerful eyes seemed almost too big for his face. He did look a little like a mouse, Shenanigan thought.
“So, Swifts,” he said, eyes gleaming, “you want to work for the Hôtel Martinet, do you?”
“Not really,” said Shenanigan.
“You have to say, ‘Yes, Boss!’ ” Souris grinned, showing a gap in his teeth. “And you have to do exactly what I say. And you have to stay close to me, and not wander off.”
“You’re, like, nine,” said Felicity. “I’m not calling you ‘Boss.’ ”
Souris shrugged, still in good humor. “Fine. But I am serious about staying close. The Hôtel likes to trick people. Even I get lost sometimes, and I bet I know more about the Hôtel than the rest of my Family combined.”
“So you’re like the Shenanigan,” said Erf. “She knows every inch of Swift House. You should see her map.”
Souris waved this off with a laugh. “Swift House could probably fit into the Hôtel three times,” he boasted. “And you need a map?”
“I don’t need one—” Shenanigan protested, riled, but Mercredi shooed them all out of the lobby before Shenanigan could defend her House’s honor.
Souris provided each of them with a whistle and a small torch they could clip to their lapel. Their main task was to collect dirty laundry, so Souris could take it down to his mother in the laundry room. They had a laundry cart that resembled a handcar, with an enormous basket and a lever to propel it along. Souris loaded them all into it, lit the lamp that swung from a pole at the front, and pushed off down the first of what felt like a thousand identical corridors.
The Swifts soon realized Souris had not been exaggerating the dangers of wandering off. The Hôtel was a maze, the corridors windowless and often unlit. It was hard to keep track of where they were; one minute they were rolling peacefully down a corridor, watching the room numbers climb—202, 204, 206, 208—when, without any warning, a second hallway thrust out from the first like a splitting branch, and they had to throw their weight to the side of the cart to swing round to 210, or else end up at 267. Within the first half an hour they had to backtrack three times, because several rooms appeared to be missing.
Shenanigan was undaunted. At the earliest opportunity, she hopped out of the cart and struck out on her own, determined to show Souris up. She was lost immediately. It took her twenty minutes of walking in circles, passing the same vase of wilted flowers, for her to finally admit it. She wished she had thought to bring chalk to mark her route, like she would in a cave system or labyrinth. In fact, looking at the faded pink wallpaper, she could see old marks and scratches, smears of rusty lipstick and pencil, as if the same idea had occurred to other disorientated guests.
When Souris finally found her and steered her back towards her sisters, they were inexplicably behind where Shenanigan had jumped off the cart.
“There are all sorts of strange quirks about the building,” he explained. “Take the staircase. No one can agree how many steps there are. And when you count the windows from the outside, there seem to be more floors than there are on the inside. Plus, some of the rooms’ measurements make no sense.”
“Oh, we’re used to that,” Shenanigan said. “It usually means there’s a secret passage. Swift House is full of them. Traps too,” she added.
Souris scoffed. “Our whole hotel is a trap,” he boasted. “Dehydration and hunger will get you just as certainly as a poisoned dart will. My sister calls it ‘passively lethal.’ ”
Shenanigan felt the sting of competition again. What was the point of something being passively lethal? Swift House was miles better than this moldy Hôtel, with its faded wallpaper and ratty carpet. Sure, Swift House also had faded wallpaper and ratty carpet, but theirs was antique.
“And you say none of your rooms are numbered?” Souris continued, shaking his head. “How do you find your way around?”
“Not everything looks the same, like it does here,” countered Shenanigan.
“The same?” Souris laughed. “You see that stain on the carpet? The one like a fish wearing a hat? You will not see that stain anywhere else in the Hôtel! That’s how I know we are on the third floor, west corridor, next to Room 334.”
“And yet you never thought of making a map?” asked Shenanigan.
Souris snorted. “What, so someone can steal it, and know everything I know? Why would I be so foolish?”
Since that was exactly what had happened to Shenanigan’s map at the Reunion, she declined to respond. She thought that maybe she’d like to let Souris loose in Swift House for a day and see how long he’d last in an actively lethal environment.
At least their new role as employees gave them a chance to meet their relatives.
“Don’t ask about her paintings,” Souris whispered as he banged on the door of Room 207. At a normal volume, he called: “Silhouette! Laundry!”
There were several thumps, and then Silhouette opened the door. Shenanigan recognized her from the lobby mob the day before—a thin woman with large, dreamy eyes, draped in so many layers of loose fabric that when she moved it took several seconds for her clothes to catch up. She blinked at the Swifts.
“Hello again,” she said, as if surprised to see them. “Have you come to steal my watercolors?”
“No,” said Shenanigan. “Just your laundry.”
Silhouette looked disappointed. “Are you sure?” She opened the door wider, giving the Swifts a view of a surprisingly neat, clean room. Enormous sheets of paper were pinned to the walls.
“I’m very inspired by the Surrealists,” Silhouette added. “They paint from dreams, you know. They say our dreams are our subconscious, telling us things.” She sighed. “Though I’m not surprised you don’t want to steal them. Lately I only ever have two types of dream.”
She gestured at two paintings. The first showed an indistinct, watery landscape with a tiny dark shape on the horizon. The second was entirely black.
“I know they’re the same person,” Silhouette said, “but in one they are very far away, and in the other they are very close. It would be nice to have a dream where they are standing at a respectable distance, so I could have a proper look at them.”
“Yes, it would,” said Souris impatiently. “Laundry?”
“Hmm? Oh, of course,” she said, but even as she bundled a pile of fabric into the cart, she was staring at the paintings again.
“Silhouette’s one of you, you know,” said Souris as they got the laundry cart rolling again. “A Swift.”
Phenomena frowned. “But she has a French name.”
“Is ‘silhouette’ not in the English Dictionary?” asked Souris pointedly. “Her mother moved to France years ago. She got married and took her husband’s last name, so you kicked her out.”
“We did no such thing!” said Shenanigan reflexively, and then realized it could be true. In the Swift Family, if someone married, their spouse was expected to take the Swift name, regardless of gender. This was less unfair to women—who historically had to take their husband’s name when they married—but only because it was equally unfair to everyone. For many years, if a Swift changed their last name for any reason, including marriage, it was seen as them renouncing their ties to the Family, and they were excommunicated—meaning no other Swift could communicate with them. Thankfully, this tradition had been retired, and nowadays many Swifts hyphenated their names when they married, becoming Swift-Johnson or, in Souris’s and Mercredi’s case, Bakir-Martinet.
“What would yours have been, if your parents had hyphenated?” asked Souris curiously.
Shenanigan realized with some surprise that she didn’t know what her father’s last name had been before he married her mother and changed it to Swift. Felicity probably did, but Shenanigan didn’t like asking Felicity questions about their parents. It made her sad.
“None of your business,” she said instead.
“Where are they, anyway?” Souris asked, eyes bright with interest. “How come you’re here with your uncle? He’s so cool!”
“He is,” said Shenanigan proudly. “But Mum and Dad are cool too. They’re having research adventures, so they can’t come home very often. Work keeps them away.”
“Oh,” said Souris. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? They send postcards.”
“Right.”
Felicity sneezed, somewhat louder than necessary, and suddenly became very interested in the carpet.
They took a large pile of washing from Bouquet, the man in the billowing sleeves, and endured his very detailed instructions on how to clean silk underwear. They collected what looked like every single sock owned by Élan, Esprit, and Ennui—in Rooms 351, 352, and 353 respectively—who were triplets, though non-identical. In fact, they looked like one piece of dough that had been pressed into three different pasta shapes.
Élan was the shortest, broad-shouldered and grinning with a jaunty flick of hair: the farfalle. Esprit was in the middle, upright and thoughtful: the penne. The last was Ennui, who looked like a long, limp bit of spaghetti. Erf looked up their names, as the brothers were in their half of the phrase book:
Élan: charm, flair
Esprit: wit, intelligence
Ennui: boredom, despair
And then there was Cliché, and Contraire, and Gazette, and Mirage, until Shenanigan’s head was swimming with names and faces and stained shirts. The entire time, Souris chattered on, telling them about everything from the Hôtel’s refund policy to the time a guest tried to flush half a roast chicken down the toilet.
“Of course, that wasn’t half as bad as last week,” he snorted. “We had a real disaster—I’ll point it out when we pass.”
The door to Room 415 was swollen and slightly warped, held closed with a shiny new padlock. Water had seeped out from beneath the door, staining the hallway rug for several centimeters beyond the threshold.
“Yuck. What happened?” asked Erf.
“That’s Pomme’s old room. Soufflé’s is just above. He overfilled his bath one too many times, and the whole thing leaked through her ceiling. Bernard was supposed to fix it, but—” He stopped. “Anyway, there’s no one to fix it. It’s awful in there. Pomme had to move, and she’s really not happy about it.”
They rolled a little farther down the corridor to Room 425, and Souris hammered on the door.
“Pomme! Laundry!”
The door opened a crack, and a bewigged head peered out into the corridor.
“You’ll get no laundry from me,” said Pomme. “Not after what happened to my trousers.”
“Quoi?”
A pair of pistachio-green trousers were thrust under Souris’s nose.
“My trousers have gone off, Souris,” said Pomme. “They were black before. Now they’re green. Is it a type of mold, do you think?”
Souris sighed. “That was Débris’s idea. She thinks that if you don’t have any other clothes, you’ll have to wear the uniform.”
“So, Débris holds my trousers hostage. Devious.” Pomme’s eyes passed over the Swifts, in their new, ill-fitting outfits. “Holy mackerel, it’s happened to you lot too. Say, could you pose for me? My mannequins just aren’t cutting it.” Before they knew it, Shenanigan and Erf had been yanked inside the room, Souris trailing after with Felicity and Phenomena.
“The Hôtel needs you, Pomme,” tried Souris.
“You can tell the Hôtel that my answer is ‘No way. Hell will freeze up before I put on that uniform.’ ”
“ ‘Freeze over,’ I think,” said Souris.
“That too.” She handed Shenanigan and Erf a pair of oversized wooden scissors. “Hold yours open,” Pomme instructed Erf, “as if you’re about to snip Shenanigan’s head off. Don’t worry, they’re not sharp. Now hole shhtill.” She dived back behind an easel with a paintbrush between her teeth.
Souris sighed, and bundled a mountain of paint-stained clothes into the laundry cart.
“I’ve got to take this down,” he grumbled to Pomme. “Will you babysit the English for a while?”
“We don’t need babysitting,” protested Felicity.
“Your aunt and uncle certainly do. Don’t worry. I’ll track them down before they starve.” Souris sauntered off, whistling.
Shenanigan swallowed, feeling the blunt edge of the wooden scissors against her throat. She tried to look around the room without moving her head. It looked like an art shop had exploded. There were pots of water crammed full of dirty brushes. Half-finished sculptures dangled from the ceiling like piñatas. Pomme had painted the walls and ceiling with strange scenes: a giant grasshopper climbed the Eiffel Tower, a woman ran screaming from a house balanced on fried chicken legs, a mongoose and an old man played chess in a tower built from alphabet blocks. Though most of the floor was covered in a dust sheet, globs of dried paint crusted the furniture like the droppings of strange alien birds. It reminded Shenanigan a little of her own room, which was full of half-finished projects, like the bow she had tried to make out of an old violin, half-read Spanish textbooks, and the food she kept hidden in case she was too busy to go to dinner.
“So you’re an artist too?” asked Phenomena unnecessarily.
“Uh-huh,” Pomme grunted, brush still between her teeth. “Ut ing shill—” She spat it out, and it clattered to the floor with a blue splat. “But I’m still trying to find my style.” She jerked her head at the half-finished paintings leaning against the wall. “I’m great at starting stuff, not so good at finishing. Okay, we’re done.”
She beckoned the children over, and they looked at the canvas. Pomme had painted Shenanigan and Erf as two laughing, furry creatures with pointed teeth, each trying to snip chunks out of the other’s pelt.
“Yes, I see the resemblance,” said Erf.
“And I see you work quickly,” said Felicity, impressed.
“I’ve got to get the ideas down before they vanish,” Pomme said. “Or before I lose interest in them.” She picked up a cup, put it to her lips, and put it down at once when she realized it was full of turpentine. “I get bored easily. And they want me to put on a uniform and work here?” She shuddered. “Even the idea makes my brain itch. Good thing you lot turned up and distracted everyone.”
Shenanigan understood what it felt like to have an itchy brain, and felt a rush of sympathy for Pomme. “They can’t make you work here,” she said, folding her arms.
“No, but they can try to make me feel guilty for refusing to. They’ve even got little Souris at it.”
“It doesn’t seem boring here at the moment,” Phenomena said. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
Shenanigan knocked a pile of sketches with her elbow, and the whole papery mess slid onto the floor, revealing a broken sink, pale pink in color and full of water balloons.
“What’s this?” asked Shenanigan.
“The sink from Soufflé’s bathroom. That’s why it’s so bare in here.” Pomme scowled, gesturing around at the exuberant clutter of her room. “I only moved in last week. My entire room was soaked. There’s a hole in the ceiling now.”
“That’s a lot of damage,” said Phenomena.
“It was a lot of bath.”
Shenanigan picked up one of the balloons. It sloshed.
“Are you going to throw water balloons in his room to get back at him?”
Pomme grinned, a catlike smile that made her upper lip thin and her incisors look especially pointy. “No, but that’s an excellent idea. Those were for an art project.” She pointed to the back wall of her room, which was splattered with explosions of paint. “Go ahead—throw it.”
Shenanigan, who was no more than a second away from throwing things most of the time anyway, hurled the balloon at the wall as hard as she could. It burst like a ripe berry, a loud, angry splurge of purple. Felicity yelped, but Pomme clapped, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.
“Congratulations! You’re doing art.”
Shenanigan bent to pick up another balloon and realized some of the paint had splashed on her sleeve, a blot of purple on the green uniform.
She looked at it. She looked at Pomme. Pomme looked at Shenanigan, and then at the paint, and then at Shenanigan again.
Sometimes you meet a person, and it’s like they’re tuned to exactly the same frequency as you.
“Give me a second to get changed,” said Pomme, diving into a pile of clothes. “Débris wants me to wear the Hôtel uniform? I’ll grant her wish.”
The Battle of Room 425 was an all-out screeching, splashing, polychromatic hullabaloo that claimed the lives of three sculptures and the dignity of an unfortunate pigeon that flew too close to an open window. Two minutes after Shenanigan struck Pomme with the first missile, the uniforms of all the Swifts—as well as the furniture and floorboards—were soaked with paint.
“This is very satisfying,” said Phenomena, hurling an orange balloon with uncharacteristic vigor. “There’s something about the way the balloons splat that acts as a psychological release valve, helping— Oh, Erf, you got green on my lab coat!”
“Is this…allowed?” asked Felicity, looking at her turquoise knee in a mixture of horror and delight.
“Nope!” shouted Pomme, raising her head from behind a coffee-table barricade. “Do it anyway! Art should always feel a bit dangerous!”
Shenanigan seized the opening, and nailed Pomme in the center of her chest with a scarlet balloon.
“A hit!” Pomme cried. “A very palpable hit!” With a theatrical groan, she threw herself backwards. “Alas! Alack! They’ve done me in! Tell my wife I love her!” she wailed. “Do not weep for me, my friends, as I shuffle off this mortal coil! Soon, I shall be pushing up the clover!”
“You mean daisies,” said Felicity, giggling.
“I’m going to kick the pail!”
“Bucket,” corrected Erf.
“They’re going to fit me for a pine waistcoat!”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” said Phenomena.
Pomme froze at the sudden reference, one hand raised in a death-claw. Silence stretched, and cracked its knuckles. Somewhere in the room, Shenanigan heard paint dripping. Looking at Pomme, in her paint-splattered wig, she understood why Pamplemousse had sprung to her sister’s mind.
“It’s, ah, all right,” said Pomme, slowly sitting up. “You don’t need to walk on eggs around me. I hope I go the way he did, honestly.”
“You want to be murder—” began Shenanigan, but Felicity poked her hard in the side.
“He died doing what he loved most,” said Pomme with a determined shrug. “Shame that what he loved most was picking fights. I prefer to make art, not war.”
Shenanigan wasn’t sure she’d count Pamplemousse’s death as him “doing what he loved most.” She was pretty sure what the average person loved most was being alive. But then, Pomme hadn’t been there to see her brother’s face change as the crossbow bolt arced towards him.
“I’m sorry I was too late—that we were too late—” Phenomena floundered.
There was a strangled cry from the doorway.
“Good news: I found your aunt and uncle!” Souris said, and Shenanigan couldn’t really blame Aunt Inheritance for being horrified at the sight of her grandchild and grand-nieces. They were now more paint than person.
“Also, Soufflé is ready to see you.”