Guests in its heyday found themselves surrounded on the ground floor by designs that were solid, geometric, echoing the patterns found in the factories of the time. On the first and second floors, the designs became more fluid, twisting and losing their angles, and by the third floor, nature had taken over.
Here, every element of the decor and the original furniture had implied a triumphant natural world, burying the industrial world’s edges beneath the flows and sweeps of leaf and coastline and animal. The Grand was unique, and strangely subversive.
As he walked up the tattered staircase to the third floor, Parry couldn’t help but smile. Gravette and Priest had been lovers at the time of the hotel’s design and construction, and throughout the building elements of that sexuality, slipped in below the radar of the rail company executives, were apparent.
It wasn’t subtle even; Parry had seen photographs of the missing mural that had adorned the foyer. Across the four sections, a vast and dark locomotive had strained, its windows filled with pale and crammed faces. The train was, in the leftmost panel, erupting from a copse of twisting, stunted trees, and in the rightmost was burying itself into a tunnel whose dark brickwork was surrounded by a collar of white.
Celebrated at the time as a grand depiction of the reach and the power of the rail industry, it was in actuality, a huge cock disappearing into a vagina. The white collar was a not-very-subtle reference to Priest, the stunted trees Gravette’s own pubic hair. How had they missed it? mused Parry as he wandered the corridors. How had they not seen?
“So what’s left?” asked Mandeville that evening. A small lamp illuminated the three men; takeaway pizza boxes littered the floor between them. Around them, Parry’s lists were piled, now covered in notations and scrawled comments.
“The carpets are all gone,“ said Parry. “I can’t find any of the original designs. Most of the rooms have been refitted, so none of the original furniture’s left, although rooms 212 and 208 have the lamp fittings in the wall. The bathrooms on the second floor were torn out in the sixties, so we know that all that’s gone, but the suites on the third floor still have the original baths with the bath taps.”
“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.
Imagine eating with this under your feet, he thought, it’d be like floating on the surface water in which huge fish swam and kept breaching and peering at you! He started to laugh and then saw the three camp beds, pushed back against the wall, and had a sudden vision of a vast leviathan emerging from under the floor and swallowing him and Parry and Yeoman whole as they slept.
Something clattered in the foyer.
It was Parry, Mandeville assumed, come to turn the radio on to drown out Yeoman’s whistling, although the architect had actually stopped his tuneless noises several minutes earlier.
He waited for the music or inane DJ chatter to begin, but nothing came except another clatter and then the sound of rapid footsteps. Sighing, he got to his feet and went to the doorway, expecting to find some trick or joke being prepared or having already been enacted; Parry and Yeoman were his friends, and were the best men he had ever worked with, but they wound each other up and let the tension out in bickering and jokes and tricks. Sometimes, it was funny; more often, it was childish and irritating.
The foyer, however, was empty.
Well, not empty. The radio was lying in the middle of the floor, no longer standing but on its back, its power cable tangled into a black knot next to it. The floor around it was covered in footprints, scuffed and indistinct in the old dust.
At first, Mandeville thought that the prints were from Parry or Yeoman, but something about them made him reassess. There were lots, overlaying each other, small and with their edges bleeding into each other, making the floor around the small radio into a manic dance chart.
Small?
The prints were small, and neither Parry nor Yeoman was a small man.
These prints were much smaller than any he or his colleagues would make. They were narrow, short, a different shape to their own footwear.
Experimentally, he placed his foot in an unmarked space and pressed it down hard. When he lifted it, he saw a faint impression of the diamond pattern of his boot sole pressed into the grime. The other footprints were far clearer, as though their makers had trodden in something before walking around the radio.
Mandeville pressed his fingers into one of the prints. His fingers came away smeared with dirt that smelled of something familiar, although he couldn’t remember precisely what.
Some of the prints appeared to trail back towards the staircase and he went to the bottom step, peering up and wondering. If it wasn’t him or Parry or Yeoman, then there was someone, several someones actually, in here with them, and judging by the size of the prints, the someones were probably kids.
Mandeville cursed under his breath. It was to be expected, of course; closed-up buildings like the Ocean Grand attracted different groups of people who wanted to get inside. Aside from historians and urban creepers, kids were the commonest intruders, with drunks and vandals close behind, and they could be a pain. If they had kids breaking in, the likelihood was that they’d damage the place, they’d piss in the corners or set fires, maybe try and steal from the SOS Crew’s equipment or belongings.
They’d have to be found and turfed out, he thought. He’d need to pull Parry and Yeoman back from the jobs they were on and they’d need to do a systematic search of the hotel. Damn, damn, damn.
Before Mandeville could call his colleagues, however, Yeoman appeared from the bar, holding one hand out in front of him. The hand was dripping blood, bright in the musty surroundings, and in a tone that was almost conversational, he said, “The fucking thing bit me!”
Yeoman refused to go to hospital, despite Parry’s insistence that the slash across his fingers needed stitches. Instead, he made Parry bind each of his injured three fingers with gauze from their first aid kit and took painkillers and told Parry to stop nagging him.
The wounds were messy, punctures that had torn sideways, elongating the openings in his flesh into a series of ragged-edged striations between the first and second knuckles of his middle fingers. They bled heavily, slow to clot despite the pressure that Parry put on them, ripping open as soon as Yeoman moved his hand. Fresh blooms of blood soon soaked the bandages covering his fingers and by the time the three men came to eat their evening meal, Yeoman had gone through three sets of dressings.
Food that night was pizza again, collected by Mandeville from one of the seafront takeaways, and over it they assessed their progress.
“There were two sorts of art here,” Parry was saying as they finished their food, “what Gravette called ‘integral’ and ‘peripheral’. The integral stuff is the panels, the floors, the stuff that was built in from the beginning. The peripheral is the other stuff, the things that could be moved or changed, like hanging pictures or chairs or the types of plates used.
“From Gravette’s perspective, the whole place was art, and everything in the building was supposed to add to the feeling of being inside a piece of living, breathing, functional art, from the taps that looked like octopuses or tits, to the colours they used in the original carpet. The peripheral stuff has mostly gone although we have records of some of it from the original design plans and in photographs, so what we’re looking at here is the integral, about fifty per cent of which is still here as far as I can tell.
“The top corridor is the best bet, although a lot of what should be there is hidden at the moment, so tomorrow we’ll take the boards off and see what state it’s in, but the rooms are mostly intact. The bar and sun deck are pretty much in their original state, although some philistine has replaced the pumps in the bar, probably in the sixties.”
“Gravette designed the pumps?” asked Yeoman.
“He designed everything. Well, he and Priest did, letting Manning in because they needed his technical skills for the building itself. I keep telling you, this whole place was a testament to Gravette and Priest’s belief in the supremacy of the natural world over the things man created.
“The fittings, the art, the colours, all of them were designed to tell people that they were insignificant when faced with the grandeur of God’s creation. The richest guests had to caress something that might have been an octopus, that might have been a tit, when they wanted to turn the tap on to run a bath or brush their teeth.
“Think of it, all the
rich industrialists whose money came from the mechanical and soulless, come to the seaside for bracing fresh air and views of the North Sea having to rub their great callused hands over brass tits every day and then had their bathwater spurt out of something that could well be Gravette’s cock! And when they went into their corridor, they were surrounded by art that only barely hid its message that shagging was the profoundest act a human could engage in behind classical and religious allusions. Even on the sun deck, they were faced with it.”
“With what? You said the sun deck was Manning’s creation.”
“It was, but he couldn’t draw for shit apparently, so he had to ask Gravette and Priest to help him. You can’t see it when you look at the carvings of the waves straight on, but when the shadows are right, you can.”
“See what?”
Instead of replying, Parry got to his feet, lifting the last piece of pizza from one of the boxes. “Come with me,” he said, chewing, and led the other two upstairs.
Mandeville followed because Parry had an artist’s heart and eye and sometimes saw things that he did not. When he put the final report together, containing his recommendations to the new owners, Parry’s suggestions about the art and what could be done with it would be central to the document.
The sun deck was dark and cold, and the sound of the nearby sea was a grey, shifting mass in the night, chilling the air further. “Stand there,” said Parry, pointing to the centre of the deck, “and crouch, so that you’re the height of someone on a sunlounger. Now, imagine, you’re reading a book, maybe having a little drink, and this is what you can see.” He pointed his torch beam at the wall, showing the carved indentations of Manning’s design; the waves, line etchings of what might have been fish, plants or undersea grottoes.
“Now,” said Parry, “watch the shadows.” He began to move his torch slowly around in an arc, travelling over the carvings. The shadows caught in the etched lines and then spilled over, stretched, blossoming into black patches like moss on the wall. Mandeville did not see anything unusual and was about to say so when Yeoman said, “Holy shit!”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 45
