The Sanatorium(18)
Elin hesitates, steadies herself. “You’re right. Let’s make the most of being here.”
Will summons the waiter over. “One of these.” He stabs the menu with his finger. “And this one.”
When the cocktails arrive, he laughs. “Minimalist like everything else.”
He’s right. The drinks are pared back, restrained. No lurid blues or pinks, no gaudy decoration. Her lychee martini is a soft blush color, a whole lychee straddling the rim of the glass. His is almost colorless.
Elin sips. The sweet tang hits her right away. The vodka burns the back of her throat: a sudden heat. It’s strong.
“Try mine?” Will pushes his glass toward her. He looks at her and smiles, but it’s stretched thin at the edges. He’s pretending now, but a few drinks in and it’ll be real.
Closing her hand around the stem of the glass, Elin feels the tension slipping from her shoulders. Will’s right. She can’t let Isaac get to her. Besides, she thinks, she isn’t here to build bridges.
This is about getting him to admit what he did, once and for all.
14
Will pushes open the door and stumbles into the room. Hand jerking out, he clumsily jams the keycard into the slot on the wall.
A fail: the plastic card bends back, slides past the target.
“Give it to me.” Laughing, Elin takes it from him, slides it carefully into the narrow slot. The room illuminates, the bright spotlights dotted above her head sending the room into sharp relief.
Instantly, she reacts: a bitter chill moving through her. Everything about this room jars, putting her nerves on edge.
It isn’t that the room’s empty—there’s a bed, a sofa, a table and chairs, but there’s none of the usual decorative stuff for the eye to hook on to: cushions, curtains, vases.
The bed is built into the wall, jutting out in one uninterrupted line, the wardrobe, too, a strange gap beneath it. A long, low sofa fits seamlessly against the wall, the white linen cover almost an exact match to the wall itself.
Perhaps her discomfort says something about her. She remembers her last review at work: Elin struggles to accommodate change. This may hamper her career prospects.
“What’s wrong?” Will kicks off his shoes, mouth relaxing into a lopsided grin. His eyes are heavy lidded, loose. He’s drunk. Worse than she’s seen him in a while.
His phone is in his hand. A loud ping sounds out.
Elin knows what it is immediately—his WhatsApp group. Joke sharing to the extreme. Some of the members are friends, others are acquaintances, friends of friends.
Will’s group communicates in a totally different way from her and her friends—no interaction is allowed beyond the actual sharing of the joke and a brief response. No pleasantries or chat, just a bombardment of jokes.
He’s staring at the screen, smiling. “Look.” He holds up his phone.
Elin scans the screen. Making a belt out of watches, it’s a waist of time.
She can’t help laughing. Though she’d never admit it, most of the jokes are actually pretty good. It’s a puerile, basic humor—a humor that neither she nor Will has ever moved on from.
She looks down at her own phone and sighs. “Isaac still hasn’t called. No message either.”
She tosses the phone onto the bed, puts her fingers to her temple. Her head is starting to throb: a dull beat at the base of her neck.
Reaching for a glass, she pours mineral water into it, takes a long swig.
It doesn’t get rid of the taste of the cocktails: the tang of the alcohol turning sour, metallic at the back of her throat.
“Forget it.” Will smiles. “Don’t ruin the night now. Not now you’ve relaxed.”
Elin stiffens. The effects of the alcohol are starting to fade. She feels pissed off all over again.
Arm dropping to her waist, Will pulls her to him, cups her hips. “We could have a romantic first night . . .”
She shrugs him off. “Maybe.” It isn’t going to happen. The more she tries not to think about Isaac, the forgotten meal, the more the frustration piles up inside her.
Elin’s full with it: Their first night and he’s left them high and dry. No normal person would do that. It shouldn’t be this hard, surely? Equal effort from both sides. Communication.
Weaving an unsteady path across the room, Elin pulls open the door, steps out onto the balcony. Swirls of milky ice frost the wooden slats.
She takes a breath of pure, icy air.
Another.
Her head starts to clear, the alcohol fug dissolving, slipping away.
“Will, look,” she calls. “You can see the view at last.” The clouds are breaking up, revealing pale streaks of sky. The hazy semicircle of moon is casting a soft light across the mountain peaks opposite.
At first glance, it’s magnificent, yet the more she looks, the more she realizes how sinister the mountains appear: raw, jagged spikes. The highest is hooked, like a claw.
Elin shudders. She thinks about what Isaac told her about Daniel Lemaitre, the missing architect. No body. No evidence.
It’s not hard to imagine, she thinks, looking out; this place somehow consuming someone, swallowing them whole.
“It’s stunning,” Will says from the doorway, “but you’d better come in. That top is thin. I’ve heard stories about drunk people not feeling the cold. Someone finds them the next day, semiclothed, dead from hypothermia.” He looks, starstruck style, at the wooden chair beside her. “That recliner—it’s the same as they’d have used back then.”