She had never been there with Jackson.
They seemed more foreboding than ever before in the quickening dark. Rain fell like sheets of cold glass and the urgency in Jackson’s footsteps grew as the forest closed in over their heads. He led her deeper and deeper into the trees, darkness growing as they travelled further from daylight, the deep gloom of the trees thickening. If she had been wandering there alone, a deep sadness would have taken her. The time-worn path disappeared as he led her away into untrodden foliage. Her clothes snagged on branches and thorns and tiny cuts sprang up threads of blood as the soft ferns gave way to the brambles and thorny bushes that closed in around her.
Jackson led her to a concealed clearing. It stood in a grove of tall trees that hid all else from their view. The floor was covered with thick moss and was just wide enough for two people to lie down side by side. She would never have known the place existed if he hadn’t shown it to her. She could hear her mother’s voice warning her, “Don’t stray off those paths, Dakota Grace. If you got lost, no one would be able to find you in those trees.”
But she knew she had been lost for some time and no one was going to rescue her.
The rain and wind whispered somewhere overhead in the tall branches of the tired trees, as she lay herself down and gave herself up under Jackson’s rain of kisses. And there in the chattering gloom and whispering breezes, she felt for the first time in years that Jackson really loved her. There was no pain or games, or fear of his wrath. There was only tenderness and desire.
“Did you really mean it?” she asked afterwards, as he lay back beside her, resting his dark head on a tree stump.
“What?” he asked, through the cigarette hanging from his lips. Dakota zipped up her trousers and sat up to light her own cigarette.
“When you said you loved me.”
“Of course I meant it. I’ve told you often enough!” he replied.
“You’ve never said it before, Jackson.”
“All the notes I sent you, the poems I read you. You couldn’t take it from that?”
“It’s the words, I’ve never heard you say them, not even to Lula,” she replied warily, afraid she had overstepped her mark by talking about his relationship with Lula. He often told her to mind her own business if she asked about it.
“Because I don’t really love her,” he said, the smoke from his mouth rising gently before a breeze whipped it away. Dakota felt suddenly confused.
“But why have you been with her so long then? You have always seemed so together. I… I am a bit jealous of the way you are together,” she admitted, blushing slightly. In all the years they had been sleeping together, they rarely spoke about Lula.
“It’s a habit really, plus I get to be with you without anyone suspecting.”
Wind whispered somewhere; squirrels twitched in the undergrowth.
“Oh,” she managed. Looking down at her hands, she wanted to look anywhere but at him. She always knew that what she was doing was wrong, but she tried to ignore it. She dreamed that people would accept her and Jackson as lovers, but she knew that what they had been doing for the last four years was not only morally wrong, it was illegal.
He would be labelled a pervert, a deviant, a paedophile, and she would be his confused and naïve victim. Lula would never forgive herself for bringing a sexual deviant into her family home. She would blame herself entirely for the years of sexual abuse and rape Dakota had suffered.
Nobody would believe that Jackson and Dakota were in love. No one would accept that she had invited Jackson into her bed, that there were several times when he would not come to her room and she would go downstairs to where he sat, lost in dark melodies and a cloud of cigarette smoke, and beg him to make her feel good again.
Who would believe that the music that he played to warn her of his approach, would be the music she would eventually play to call him up to her room.
She had come to realise that nobody would ever understand what was going on between her and Jackson. No one would ever believe that she allowed him to do all the things he did. No one would believe she could no longer live without him.
She hated it when reality slipped into her life with him. She had learnt not to feel guilt about the fact that she was sleeping with her sister’s boyfriend. She had learnt never to show any affection for him around other people.
But when it came to the fact that she may never have Jackson all to herself, she switched off before the thought drove her insane. Deep in her heart, she dreamt of a time when she would not have to share him, when she could be alone with him all the time and not have to hide her desire for him.
“OK, we’d better get home. Lula will be worried,” she said suddenly and stood up. Jackson looked up at her from the moss-drenched floor. His blue eyes showed the understanding that reality was with them again.
It was getting darker and colder. In the distance beyond the trees, the rain had stopped and all that they could hear was the whispering sky above them. When Jackson had led her back to the path, she had paused and looked back to where the clearing was hidden. She found herself standing in front of the ‘Witch Tree.’ It was a huge dead tree that resembled a wild-haired woman with her arms raised to the sky. Knots in the wood gave the impression of a tormented facial expression. She had been told as a child that the tree was where a witch had been executed in the olden days, and her spirit had gone into the tree and killed it. She had never seen it before because it was so far off the beaten path; she had often thought it was just a mythical tree. Spooky stories that Lula told her said that at night you could hear the witch screaming to be released from her prison of a tree.
Dakota shuddered.
Jackson and Dakota walked home in silence. She was unsure if knowing he loved her made her feel better or worse. While it was a wonderful affirmation, knowing that her love was reciprocated, the thought that Lula was the one who got to be public with him made her angry. But she and Jackson knew that the only way they could continue to be together was if he stayed with Lula.
Dakota was comforted by the fact that Jackson and Lula rarely had sex, and even more rarely slept in the same bed. Her sister’s dependency on strong sedatives always meant their nightly meetings went undiscovered.
As much as she longed for things to be different, the years had let her slip into an acceptance of how things had to be.
By the time they reached home, Lula was sitting in front of the television with a bottle of wine and a cigarette.
“You were right, she was at the cemetery,” said Jackson, sitting down and giving Lula a brief kiss on the cheek.
“You were gone a while. I put the dinner in the oven,” she replied indifferently.
“Well, you know D. She wanted to sit awhile by the grave, so I wandered off and waited for her. Didn’t want her walking back in the dark alone,” he said, taking a cigarette from Lula’s packet.
“Did you tell her about the job?”
“What job?” interrupted Dakota from the doorway.
“Well, Jackson has managed to get you a job at the library, just on Saturdays and holidays,” explained Lula excitedly.
“Oh right. Weren’t you going to ask if I wanted a job?”
“No. You need a job – you’re sixteen now. I can’t afford to keep buying you things. You need to be earning so you can buy your own clothes and things. Anyway, it will stop you spending all your spare time moping around the house,” Lula quipped at her. “Say thank you to Jackson, then!”
“Thank you to Jackson!” she mimicked in a high-pitched voice.
She hated that Lula had gone over her head, but she was quite pleased that she would get to be a part of Jackson’s life that Lula had no part in.
She remained standing in the doorway as Jackson and Lula cuddled up on the sofa. She grimaced slightly and turned away to notice a man standing on the other side of the road. His features were hidden in shadow as the amber streetlight poured evenly down over his head. She could tell he was fairly old, a
s his hair was thinning. He had the look of a vagrant or wandering drunk person as he brought the can of beer up to his invisible mouth and continued to look directly into the lounge at Dakota. For a few moments, she stared back at the spectator. Then she began to feel a bit nervous; she could feel his eyes burning into her, and the fact that she could not see his face began to unnerve her even more.
“Uh, there’s someone out there, staring right into the house,” she muttered, moving slightly towards the window. Lula and Jackson stood up together and made their way past her to get a closer look.
“Oh shit,” muttered Jackson, and quickly made his way out of the house into the street.
“Come on, want some food?” asked Lula, physically removing her sister from the lounge.
“Do you know who that was?”
“No, Jackson’s gone to see him off. Just some drunk, probably. Come on, your dinner will still be hot,” and before she could do anything, Dakota had been made to sit down at the dinner table and was being watched as she started to eat.
A few moments later she heard Jackson come back in through the front door. Lula made a quick exit, pulling the kitchen door half closed as she went out to meet Jackson. Even though they were whispering, Dakota could still make out their conversation.
“What the fuck was he doing out there?” muttered Lula, sounding furious.
“You know what he’s like. He just wanted to see how we were doing. He won’t come back,” Jackson replied.
“I don’t want him anywhere near D, OK? If I see him out there again, I am calling the police!”
“Calm down for god’s sake, he’s gone all right!”
Dakota finished her dinner off and went up to her room in silence. Later on, when Jackson came in, she asked him almost immediately, “Who was that man outside?”
“My dad. And don’t ask me anything else cos I won’t answer you,” he replied. And that was the end of the matter.
SEVENTEEN: L is for Love
Dakota was wandering the corridors of Purgatory. Darkness was pervasive as ever, yet she strolled unafraid, but with a feeling that she was looking for something. It seemed hers was the only soul in Purgatory. Everyone else was gone, leaving the feeling of entering a long empty house.
Shadows swayed about her and lights flickered in the gloomy distance.
A voice was singing somewhere ahead of her, words she could not yet make out although she recognised the tune. It was as though they were beckoning her, taking form, a man in the blackness calling her onwards with his long-fingered hands. The voice was distant and hollow, as though the owner was singing through a tin can, but Dakota began to make out the words:
“L is for love baby
O is for only you that I do…”
She followed the disembodied voice, out of the maze of corridors until she was in the deserted hotel lobby. No dim creatures lurked in the corners, no breezes disturbed the cobwebs as she moved through and out of the front door, out into the night. There was no rain and above there were stars, a wind was whispering somewhere and the voice continued to call her on, to lure her into the endless night, onwards into the bleak trees.
She paused a moment, considering whether to continue her pursuit, but a second later when the voice resumed its song, she moved forward, into the wall of trees.
“R is for rape me
M is for murder me…”
She felt no fear of the woods; it was as though she really belonged there, as though she felt safer amongst the trees than in the hotel. The dead trees rubbed their dry fingers together as she looked up at the branched sky, and she felt her heart beating again in her chest. Joy filled her as she put her hand over her chest and felt life within, and then she felt another movement in her.
A gentle kick in her womb.
Tears filled her eyes as she clasped her swollen stomach, the joy of being given another chance to have her child. And she continued to walk, the breeze carrying the tinny voice of the shape in the distance, a figure up ahead moving through the trees. And no matter how fast she ran, she could not catch up with the person up ahead; they remained elusive and clothed in sinister shadows, always just out of reach.
“I’ll be your lover man, til the bitter end,
while empires burn down
Forever and ever and ever and ever Amen...”
There was something familiar about the woods to her. The smells grew more familiar and the path formed ahead to show her the way. She knew these woods; she had been here before.
The figure ahead was gone and she began to run, only to collapse in agony as a searing pain shot through her torso. She screamed against the grim trees as blood covered her hands and her swollen stomach shrank back into her body. The moonlight broke through the trees to illuminate her hands, slicked with dark blood.
“My baby!” she screamed, her heart suddenly silent in her chest. And as the pain ebbed away she looked up to see a tree, in the shape of a screaming woman, with wild hair and her dry arms raised to the sky. She had been here before.
At the base of the tree, where the bark bunched to form a shape like the top of a woman’s thighs, stood two men, still and silent. No one moved until the old man Woods opened his mouth and began to sing again to her:
“L is for love baby…”
As the lyrics led down to the words ‘rape’ and ‘murder’, Jackson joined in. The voices trailed around her like smoke, then crawled inside her head and circled around, unending and hypnotic. The two men moved towards her, hands outstretched, and she sat frozen on the ground, blood dripping from her fingers as she attempted to scream. Hands closed over her mouth as the blackness swarmed into her eyes.
Awake, Dakota was thrashing her arms about her, still unable to scream, but Betty was there trying to hold her down into her chair.
“It was a dream. You are awake, OK? It was a dream!” repeated Betty, over and over until Dakota sat still again.
“What happened? I was reading… I thought it was happening, or had happened.” Dakota wiped tears from her face, a hand pausing over the quietness in her chest.
“You dozed off a while ago. I just left you and carried on reading. What did you see? You were singing, you know!” She half laughed, offering Dakota a cigarette as she lit her own. Dakota took it without thinking and didn’t enjoy it one bit as she went through the motions of smoking it.
“What was I singing?”
“Couldn’t make it all out; sounded like you were spelling something out. I remember you saying ‘L is for Love’ but the rest was a bit mumbled. What was going on in your head, darling?”
“It was horrible; I don’t want to think about it anymore. Uh, have you read much?”
“Well yeah, I just skimmed most of it really, to get the gist, you know, and then skipped to the ending!” She giggled. “It was fab. I got to read the end of a story!”
“So who was I?”
“Well, Miriam!” said Betty enthusiastically. “You led a mainly boring life, born in the mid-1950s. You were rich, you married a rich man while you were quite young and did things that rich people did in those days.” She faked a yawn. “But… you became a bit naughty when you met a servant called George Whatley. He was working in your house and you got involved with him, only two days after he started working for you! I won’t go into details, but it was steamy to say the least!”
Dakota giggled slightly as Betty raised her eyebrows and shook a finger at her.
“My my, how very interesting!” She laughed, ignoring grunts from other patrons of the Library who lurked behind the shelves.
“Anyway… he got a bit obsessed with you and vice versa, but after a while you realised you would lose everything if you were caught out, so you sacked George and ended the affair. Needless to say, he didn’t take it well, and he… well he murdered you one night after forcing you to meet him to talk about things. That was in 1975, just before you were reborn as Dakota, I’d say.”
Dakota looked silently at her. The news that sh
e had been murdered in her previous life was a shock to her.
“Where did I go to meet him?” she asked quietly.
“Ummm...” Betty thumbed back through the book and located the beginning of Miriam Page’s last meeting with her lover. “Uh, you met him by a river on the edge of your estate, in the early hours of the morning. You argued for a while – he had threatened to tell your husband – and you told him you would lie and say he was stalking you, have him arrested. So he lost his temper, hit you a few times, then drowned you in the river.”
“Betty, is it possible for two souls to meet up in more than one life?”
“Don’t see why not. We all have a few lives, don’t we? What’s to say the same souls don’t meet up in every life we live? Why do you ask?”
“Betty, I think that I was murdered by Jackson, in my last life, and now I think he may have killed me in the life previous to that. Does that sound crazy?”
“When you are here in this place, nothing seems crazy anymore! Why would you think that he was George Whatley?”
“The way he killed me. In my last life, I had nightmares all the time that Jackson murdered me. In the dreams, he always killed me, but in different places and with different methods. One of them was to drown me in a river,” she explained, her mind racing suddenly with the possibilities. She stood up suddenly and put her hand to her forehead.
“I am so stupid! All this time, I have been going through the horror of remembering my whole life, when all I had to do was look at Jackson’s book!” She shot off past Betty, disappearing into the dusty shadows of the library. Her eyes strained in the dim light to find the right bookcase, as Betty appeared beside her.
“What name are we looking for, then?” she asked, puffing smoke all over Dakota.
“Jackson Shade. It should be along here somewhere,” Dakota replied, frantic with desperation to find him, as though she would actually meet him there in the gloom of the library, with his long dark hair and his eyes like a sad dream.
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