Purgatory Hotel

by Anne-Marie Ormsby

  SIX: Remembering

  The Bar looked the same; a few more people sat at the dirty tables as she made her way back in a trail of rain and sorrow in her wake.

  Danny sat at the end, smoking and watching her approach through the dim and dirty room. He did not ask why she was soaked through; he just got up and poured her a drink, cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling across his face.

  “You all right?” he asked. Dakota looked up and again recognised his accent as she had the night before. It almost hurt to hear it, making her think of things that did not belong here, in this damp mildewed room where whispers slithered out of the shadows and gave life to its flickering edges.

  Moments before, she had reached into her pocket and pulled out the sodden clump of paper and tobacco that had been her own stash, and dropped them on the bar with a thick slap.

  “So what are all those clocks for in the lobby?” she asked.

  “Well, if you’re going to visit the living it helps to know what time of day it is there. That door takes you back to wherever you need to go, if you want to try and contact them that are still alive,” he explained.

  “Ahh, so there is such a thing as ghosts then? So I can go back and spook people then?” she asked, almost laughing.

  “If you want, but it takes a lot of energy to communicate. It’s tiring – people who try to do too much end up right back here, exhausted, unable to move or do anything. This place seems empty a lot of the time – most of the residents go back to cause havoc, others just go back to watch. A lot of them hang around clairvoyants, hoping to God they might be able to get through to someone. They’re all so fucked up, they just want to stay with the living.”

  “But if we are here to be punished, how come we can just do what we want? If it makes them happy to go back and wreak havoc, surely they aren’t being punished anymore? They could just stay there forever!” She found herself asking the strangest questions.

  “It’s not nice going back, you know! It’s terrible to see your loved ones and not be able to communicate or be acknowledged by them. I went back once and I’ll never do it again; took me months to recover. It’s a natural thing to try and make amends for what sent you here. You can’t stay there anyway.” He got up to serve another customer. “They bring you back when you get too weak. Being there is draining for us, and communicating can really take it out of you. There are those who do the whole ‘poltergeist thing’ and you have to be strong to do that. They can’t do it all the time, but they just enjoy the interaction with the living – makes them feel less dead, I think. The less you do when you are there, and the less emotion it causes you, the longer you get to stay. But no matter what way you look at it, you are still being punished whether you are here or there.”

  “I guess that’s the idea though, isn’t it? Everything about this place will make you insane eventually.” She looked down the bar to the other customer. He had obviously just arrived. He was confused and shaking as he gulped down the sickly whisky he was given. He jumped, smacking into the bar, as a drunk, dirty young man fell against him, dribbling and mumbling incoherently.

  “Danny, how come there aren’t more people here? I mean I’d expect to see millions of residents from different times and stuff.” Danny wandered back down to where she was sitting as the new arrival grabbed the bottle of whisky and raced out of the Bar.

  “It’s got something to do with dimensions. There are millions of people here – you just can’t see them all.” He shrugged. “I heard someone say once that you can see them all if you concentrate hard enough. Must be like being psychic or something.”

  Silence sat between them for a while as Dakota tried to understand the whys and wherefores of the hotel. Then she realised it was as pointless as trying to understand the depths of space and whether there was an edge to the universe. As a child, she had imagined that there was a point where space and the stars ended, and beyond was just white nothingness. As though the universe was a fruit bowl on God’s dining table. That his cupboard was full of other universes that lived in tea cups and coffee mugs.

  “So you went outside, then?” Danny asked, changing the subject and pointing to her boots that oozed with mud. Dakota looked down at them and wrinkled her nose at them, suddenly aware of the thick wet contents and how it felt between her toes.

  “Yeah, didn’t get far, I wanted to see the lake, but the rain was so heavy it hurt.”

  “I don’t think there’s a person here who hasn’t tried to get out there. Nobody gets very far. Of course some of the residents are mad enough to go out to the woods.”

  “Yeah that guy, the rapist, goes out there, I think. What’s in the woods? Why would he keep going out there?”

  “Which rapist?” He laughed. “We got loads of ’em!”

  “Looks about sixty, long grey hair, laughs a lot? Why would he want to go to the woods? There’s no girls to rape out there, is there?”

  “Oh him. Some of the worst ones don’t ever come in here; they just stay out there, lurking in the dark to frighten newcomers as they arrive on the shore. Besides, I imagine part of his punishment is never being able to rape a woman again.”

  “So some do arrive without just waking up on the floor?”

  “Yeah, the ones who pass over naturally, their deaths are easy, so when they get here they have the punishment of having to walk up to the hotel through the woods. It’s usually the old men who pass on nice and easy of a heart attack or of old age, but when they were still mobile they used to fiddle with children,” Danny replied, shaking his head slightly.

  “So do you know what crimes you have to commit to come here?”

  “Well, so far as I can tell, you have to be a rapist, murderer or child abuser. Or you have to have committed suicide – that’s a big one here, I think, but they don’t usually stay here as long as the others, for some reason. It’s amazing how far those three things stretch. I mean you get people here who allowed abuse to continue even when they knew about it. You get politicians and world leaders here – even though they didn’t pull the trigger they allowed thousands of people to die in wars and conflicts. There are other things that get you sent here, I’m sure. I just haven’t met many who didn’t commit any of those particular ones. It’s a bit like being in a hospital for the criminally insane.”

  “Maybe I killed myself?” Dakota wondered out loud. It seemed to fit with her memories so far. Perhaps she never recovered from her parents’ deaths.

  A drunken brawl kicked off behind her and two men began punching each other as tables and glasses scattered.

  “Why do they let people drink for nothing here?” asked Dakota. “I mean the kinds of people who end up here are hardly going to be pacified by huge amounts of whisky!” She jumped out of the way as one man flew up against the bar, smacking his head and crumpling to the floor.

  “It’s a trick,” replied Danny, pulling her away and whispering in her ear. “It was in the bible – ‘wine and drunkenness take away the understanding’.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They give us alcohol and booze to cloud our judgement and the chances of us ever leaving grow smaller as the years pass.”

  “I never see you drink,”

  “Heh, that’s part of my punishment. I can’t leave this room, but I can’t touch alcohol. I am forced to remain where I spent most of my life, but without the help of drunkenness.” He smiled.

  “I don’t get it. Surely they want us to repent? Doesn’t God want us to get to Heaven?” she asked, slightly dismayed.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t have all the answers, but it seems like they make it as difficult as possible for you to leave, without giving you an easy ride. It’s like God tests you and tests you until you can truly prove that your soul is worth saving.”

  “What did you do to get in here?” she asked, but was unsurprised when he avoided her question yet again and began to clear up the broken glasses.

  An image from the past surfaced: her
mother reading the Bible to her at Easter. In her soft Irish tones, she told Dakota how Judas came to kiss Jesus and betrayed him in the dark and malevolent garden.

  Dakota felt the sadness rise to her throat again as she thought how much she wanted to see her parents, have her mother play with her hair as she laid her head on her lap, be safe and warm in Daddy’s arms again. But it could be a very long time before she’d feel safe again; she couldn’t atone for what she couldn’t remember. And there was no soft light, no sad-eyed Christ to answer her tears. She was amongst the fallen, put away from the presence of God and all his angels that she had seen in the pages of the Bible. She remembered Gustav Dore’s drawing of the circle of angels, the gateway to Heaven shimmering with love and light, the flutter of wings, huge and white. It was all wrong; she had never seen this place in paintings, and she wasn’t prepared for this. She had expected angels and flowers and Jesus and Mary Magdalene and his friends would all be there, and maybe even Judas was allowed into Heaven.

  Dakota was weeping quietly in the dark corner of the Bar. All her childhood images of death and Heaven were useless now. All she had left was despair, rain and endless night filling her up with every passing moment. She had done something bad, something that had made God angry, and he had sent her here to make up for what she had done.

  SEVEN: The Boy in the Hallway

  Dakota wiped her face clean of tears and swept out of the Bar. She didn’t want to go up to her room. She didn’t know where to go to feel safe. The Lobby was full of people shouting and fighting, so she looked the other way down the hallway that ran outside the Bar. She realised she hadn’t been down there, so she headed towards where it turned a corner and stretched on forever. It was unbelievable – the corridor had no end that she could see and she sensed that it went on for miles. Curiosity had her walking down it, though, wondering where it led.

  In the available light from the oil lamps she could see the same velveteen wallpaper that grimaced in the lobby, but out here it was in a worse state, peeling weakly, its colours insipid and rotten. Spiders had lived amongst the wrought iron lampstands for some time, their webs now a haven for dust old as time. The air smelt old and musty, as though it was composed entirely of the same dust and cobwebs that she had to swipe from her eyes.

  The dim wall lamps offered little help. Shadows crawled in towards them like cloaked figures and it felt like the dark was trying to suppress the light, pushing it back into the source. She felt uneasy; she had the perception that the deep shadows concealed things she did not want to know about; darkness pressed in on her like a mantle making her feel a little claustrophobic. Just as she decided she didn’t want to go any further, something moved beside her.

  She froze. The sensation was cold, as if someone had coated her in ice water, but it was caused by someone watching her at very close quarters. The darkness stared into her and she looked back, trying to see who was there in the shadow.

  “Who is that?”

  Silence answered her. A cold wind was whispering down the hallway, disturbing the flames of the wall lamps, and the shadows danced momentarily, freakishly. A lamp on the wall beside her came back to life after fading out the moment she stood still. The new glow of light brought her face to face with a boy who was an inch or so shorter than her.

  Dakota leaped back in fright – if her heart had been beating it would have hammered itself out of her chest – but the boy stood very still, watching her reaction with an expressionless face.

  Steadying herself, she recognised him as the boy from the lobby she had seen on her arrival.

  “You scared the shit out of me! What are you doing?” she asked, half-angry.

  “Nothing, just standing here,” he replied, so still and calm in comparison to his demeanour when she had last seen him. His legs were still and his eyes no longer darted about. Dakota felt kind of sorry for him, strangely unafraid of the boy lurking in the shadowed hall.

  “Sorry if I startled you. I’m Dakota. Who are you?”

  “David. I saw you arrive the other day. You said to Ariel you didn’t remember what happened to you?” he asked, his voice low and steady.

  “Yeah, head injuries or something, can’t remember anything… well, I just remembered stuff from my childhood, but the rest is gone.” She shrugged. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  He said nothing but raised his arms up towards her, wrists uppermost. Dakota jumped back against the dark dirty wall as she saw great deep gashes appear on his forearms. Blood flowed away from the wounds in great fat rivers dripping, panicked, to the floor.

  “I hate blood. Now they make me bleed all the time to punish me for stealing my life from God.” He spoke steadily, his eyes wide and dull, boring into her. “That’s why I’m in the dark. I can’t see it if it’s dark. I can just feel it, wet, all over my hands.” He looked down at his arms and she followed his gaze to see the cuts in his wrists were gone.

  “Why did you kill yourself?” she asked, relieved the blood was gone. “You don’t look any older than eighteen.”

  “Couldn’t take it anymore. My dad beat me almost every day of my life, and I was too much of a coward to fight back. You’d do it, too… years of abuse, bruised and battered so bad I couldn’t leave the house half of the time. I wanted to kill him, stab him in the neck and watch blood pour down his fat useless body. But I didn’t want to go to hell, so I killed myself instead.”

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, trying to forget the imagery he had just introduced into her brain.

  “I don’t know… time passes strangely. It could be years or weeks, but it’s been a long time. They all blend in the end and it never gets any better, you never feel any safer. It’s a nightmare you cannot wake from. You can’t even close your eyes to it.” He muttered on, staring intently at her, as though he was expecting a reaction from her. “There is no justice here. You might have lived a good life, but one mistake, or one choice, makes all the difference. I was always the victim. Maybe if I had stayed the victim all my life I could have gone to Heaven. But no! They send me here, among murderers and rapists, to pay my dues! What justice is that? Where is that ‘just God’?”

  A laugh escaped from his throat, and suddenly he was laughing manically, tears pouring down his face as he turned away from her and ran up the corridor, deeper into the bowels of the hotel.

  As his laughter faded off into the distance, the wall lamps flickered further up the hall from her, the lights around her died off and a sudden burst of light from a lamp in the distance revealed another person standing about ten yards away. Dakota felt fear burning in her stomach as the spectator stood very still, watching her in the weak light. A second later the lights faded again and he was swallowed by the surging shadows as they fought to gain control of the hallway. Dakota bolted back towards the lobby, suddenly afraid of the dark again and all it contained. The light around her rose and fell as she raced back to the more substantial light near the door to the Bar. The darkness seemed to follow her, and she realised the whole lower floor of the hotel was even dingier than before.

  As she raced into the Bar she came face to face with Danny, who seemed about to lock the doors.

  “You best get back to your room – it’s getting darker. All the crazies come up from the basement when it gets like this. It’s not safe down here. Go to your room and lock the door.”

  “Why is it getting darker?” she asked, panting and panicked by Danny’s warning.

  “It just does. It means the Punishers are coming out. It usually lasts a while, so just stay in your room. Go on, get out of here!”

  “Punishers?” she asked frantically as distant wails reached her ears.

  “For some of the residents, just being here isn’t enough punishment. If you behave badly here, you get punished. Get to your room and hope you haven’t been bad!” he shouted, slamming the Bar door to lock it.

  Dakota felt the dark surging up around her, and the air began to fill with an even mustier smell
than usual. Low cackles and screeches began to fill the air and she darted into the elevator as a bald man with no teeth ran at her, laughing sadistically.

  EIGHT: The Punishers

  When Dakota arrived on her own floor, all was quiet. She listened out for Woods, but his laughter must have been ringing through the twisted forest instead. She paused outside her door and listened to the sounds coming from the other rooms. There was a low hum of music, too quiet for her to identify, and the occasional sound of weeping. Further away, a man was crying out loudly.

  “I’m sorry! How many times do I have to say it?” Followed by his own wailing and moaning.

  Then other voices began to become clear: a hundred people talking to themselves or to others.

  “I’d do it again if I had to, believe me!”

  “You deserved everything that happened to you!”

  “It was an accident; it went off in my hand!”

  “I couldn’t help myself. They were so cute, I had to take them home and keep them.”

  “They asked for it! Every single one of them!”

  The voices faded in and out, all in their own private hells, all trying to excuse their crimes.

  Movement down the corridor made her focus again. The wall lamps flickered and sneezed in the gasping dark, the corridor grew and shrank in length as lamps in the distance breathed in and out again.

  Then once more the silhouette came into view. He was watching her again, silent and foreboding. Just before the wall lamp behind him flickered out, she saw him begin to advance on her again.

  Before he could complete his first step, Dakota was in her room with the door bolted. She wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, but she was afraid he would speak again. Instead she whispered into her hands, “Go out to the woods, leave me alone!”

  The oil lamp flooded insipid light over her tiny room as she crossed to look out of the window again. Beyond the faded velvet, the storm still raged, like a monster trying to smash its way into the hotel, its fist throwing bolts of lightning into the earth.