“The French poem, is it? The one I never understood?” she asked, still shaking.
“It’s called The Ghost. How funny that I used to recite it to you for all those years and here we are now, and I’m still haunting you.” He wasn’t laughing.
“As others reign through tenderness,
Over your life and youthfulness,
I want, myself, to reign through fear.”
His words repeating the very poem she had found in her bed set a new chill in her bones. She felt odd that she had been so intimate with him in life, even unafraid at times of his wrath, as though she knew him so well he could do nothing to make her feel in danger. But now it was different, just like it was when he first laid hands on her, a deep burning fear that she did not know what he was capable of, or what death had done to his feelings for her.
“I’m sorry… that I killed you,” she managed, worried that her apology might make him angrier, but hoping it might make him calmer.
“Well, from all I’ve read since I got here, seems I was due a violent death. You finally managed to get in there before me, eh?”
Dakota laughed uneasily, waiting for him to turn on her. She began wondering if she could make it to the door before him, or would a sudden break for freedom only make the situation worse.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it. I can’t recall any of it clearly.”
“Seems you couldn’t remember anything clearly, been spending all that time down at the Library. Can you really remember nothing?” he queried.
“Well I remember everything up to killing you now, but no, when I got here, I had no memory. But after reading for a while and judging by our past lives, I assumed you had killed me, but now I—”
“Ahh, so it’s still an unsolved mystery, eh? Hehe, that must be unbearable.” He laughed coldly.
“You know... you know who killed me?”
“Of course. I followed you very closely after you murdered me, you see, D. I never could bear to be parted from you, and those feelings got even stronger after I was dead. But you don’t remember any of it, do you? How amusing.” He smirked as he stamped his cigarette out on her floor.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” she snapped, finding herself growing tired of his game.
“No, you are going to remember by yourself, D, and I can’t wait to see your face!” he began, walking across to her bed. “How many times have I stood over your bed? How many times have you been afraid of me? And how many times have you loved that feeling? This is just one more time, D, and you have so many more to remember. We’re going back to the Library together and I am going to watch you remember.”
“You’re sadistic. Why did I love you?” She spat back, angry that even now when they were both dead, he was still in control of her.
“It’s all you knew how to do,” he replied and grabbed her for a long angry kiss, before dragging her off the bed and pushing her out into the dim corridor.
The noise she made from slamming into the wall opposite caused Betty to open her own door. She stared out wide eyed at Dakota, looking a bit confused.
“You all right, love?” she asked.
“Yeah, just great. Betty, this is Jackson,” she replied, rubbing her arm where it had smacked the wall.
“Eh?” she asked, peering out down the corridor. Dakota looked at Jackson who just smiled and pressed the button to call the elevator.
“Can’t you see him?” Dakota asked incredulously.
“You had way too much vodka I think, girl. Perhaps you ought to get some kip, eh?” Betty spoke to her like she was an idiot in need of calming down.
“Are you saying you can’t see him? He’s right there!” she half shouted, pointing right at Jackson. Betty shook her head and tutted.
“You really are obsessed with him, aren’t you? Get some sleep, love, we’ll talk later,” she muttered and closed her door.
Just then the elevator door opened and Jackson pushed Dakota in.
“Stop fucking pushing me! Why can’t she see you?”
“I don’t matter to her, obviously,” he shrugged. “By rights, you shouldn’t be able to see me either, but it seems you can communicate with souls in other dimensions.”
“What? You are in another dimension? Is that why you kept appearing and vanishing?”
“Yeah, I didn’t realise you could see me at all, until you shouted at me in the corridor by the library. I was most surprised,” he offered as the elevator slammed onto the ground floor.
“Why can you see me, then?”
“I asked Ariel about that. She said that they can’t control every emotion and the strongest feelings cause strange changes in the laws of Purgatory: killers see their victims if they end up here too, victims see their killers. And I saw you, the minute you arrived.” He paused as the door of the elevator opened and he moved her out into the hall. “I was standing right here, waiting for you, I saw you pass over, D, and I was waiting for you when you finally got off the floor of the lobby. I’ve barely been apart from you since, but once I realised you could see me I had to be more careful. It’s emotion that makes me visible to you, just as it made you visible to Lula. So your friend Betty was actually right when she said you were obsessed with me. If you weren’t we wouldn’t be able to see each other.”
Dakota recalled her sister’s screams when she saw her, how awful it must have been for her to see her dead sister.
“So you have been with me since I got here?”
“Not always right beside you but close enough to know where you were all the time.” His eyes grew intense as he stared at her; he had looked at her that way so many times, she thought he was going to kiss her again and her stomach tightened. “Told you I’d never let you go,” he whispered before grabbing her and pushing her down the corridor towards the library.
“Heh, so we’re special, huh? Able to see each other across dimensions and all that?” She attempted a laugh as she regained her footing.
“Yep, you are walking around your dimension talking to yourself and I am doing the same in mine,” he replied as they wandered past the guttering lights.
“So where are you?”
“Just another dimension. It isn’t planned, but sometimes, as I said, the rules get broken and some of us break through to the other dimensions of this place,” he muttered, lighting another cigarette.
“Lucky old me stuck with Goldman though, eh?” Dakota tried humour again, whilst rooting around for her own cigarettes.
“Don’t worry, I can see him too, and vice versa, I suppose we must have had a ‘special’ relationship, too. Can you shut up now? You’re boring me, D.” He sighed.
They finally reached the Library in silence and she went in, heading straight for her own book on the shelf again.
Dakota settled down at a table and lit herself a cigarette as she turned the pages to where she had finished. Again the images of Jackson lying dead in the woods flooded her mind. She looked up at him sheepishly.
“Do you know what’s so funny about you killing me, D?” he said, sensing what she was thinking. “I wasn’t leaving you.”
“What?” She looked utterly shocked and confused. “What do you mean?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t know me better. I was testing you again, punishing you for ever leaving. I thought you would just cry a lot and be depressed, and then I was going to leave Lula.” He was almost laughing. “Then you went and killed me! I can’t believe you fell for it!” His laughter disturbed the quiet air of the Library, and left Dakota feeling unnerved. She couldn’t ever remember hearing him laugh like that. The blow was equal to discovering she had killed him in the first place. It was all for nothing. She would have had him to herself anyway; she had ruined everything by not seeing through his game. She was even more disgusted with herself.
Furious, she ignored Jackson’s laughter and turned back to the book, to the last chapters of her life.
THIRTY-ONE: The Killer
The moments
that followed Dakota’s realisation that she had actually killed Jackson were oddly calm and organised. She picked up the rock she had killed him with and walked a few feet away to the brook that babbled past the clearing, when she got to the icy cold water she washed the rock and placed it on the bed of the brook.
Returning to where he lay, she stopped to look around. She knew he might not be found for days here, so she took him by the wrist and dragged him out of the clearing and through the undergrowth towards the path. She strained hard to move him. With each second that she tugged at his lifeless body, pulling him through the ferns, she felt more and more as though the muscles in her arms were about to burst. He was heavy and though she was strong, she was not strong enough to pull him all the way out onto the path. Pausing by a tree to catch her breath, she decided she could take him no further and would just have to hope someone would chance upon him.
Her mind trawled through remembered images of crime programmes on the television as she leant down and pulled his wallet from his back pocket, all the while carefully avoiding looking at his face.
Then she simply turned away and after a few moments of looking down at Jackson’s lifeless face, she walked out of the woods and back to the house, where she climbed up silently into her bedroom.
Back inside she opened her bedroom door a crack and listened to Lula’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in the other room. She had a feeling that Jackson had perhaps given her sister a slightly stronger dose that night – just one more tablet crushed up and dropped in her wine, as she had seen him do many times before.
Pulling Jackson’s wallet from her pocket, she didn’t even pause to look at it before hiding it under the floorboards with her diaries.
Assured that Lula was undisturbed, Dakota got changed and got back into bed; and then for the first time in years Dakota fell straight to sleep, thinking somewhere deep down in her soul that tonight she needn’t stay awake, because Jackson would not be coming to her room.
Her dreams that night were dark and full of deep forests whose late night noises were strange and unnatural. She heard Goldman there, laughing his wicked laugh out in the gloom, and as she walked alone, she sensed another presence there, another being tracking her through the endless night and moaning trees. She felt slight fear in her belly, low down, just like she had those nights when she heard Jackson mount the stairs. But the fear was mixed with desire and half of her yearned for the moment that other being would step out into the path ahead of her.
Somewhere not too far from her she heard someone singing.
When Dakota opened her eyes that first morning she screamed.
As her weary eyes flickered she was aware of a presence in the room, something watchful, something too close to her bed for comfort. And in the split second her eyes opened, she saw Jackson leaning over her bed.
Her door flew open and Lula ran in. “What? What’s wrong?” she half screamed herself.
“Uh… oh god Lula, sorry!” she stuttered as the previous night flooded back into her head. “I thought there was someone in the room; I just got a fright,” she managed, her heart bursting in her chest.
“Oh dear, were you having a bad dream?” Lula walked across to her sister and stroked her hair. “God, you’re soaked with sweat! Must have been a bad one!”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Dakota wiped the sweat away from her forehead, as Lula left the room muttering about tea and how she’d better wake Jackson up.
Dakota lay back down and listened to Lula go downstairs and start searching for Jackson. Before long she heard the phrase, “It’s not like him to go out so early,” over and over again.
She finally got up and got dressed, repeating in her head that she had to keep her act going and that everything would be all right – no one would suspect her of killing Jackson. She just had to keep her head together and all would be fine.
It wasn’t long before Lula was panicking, ringing round everyone she knew to ask if they had seen him anywhere. All replied no and the more Lula heard the word no, the more she panicked.
It was early afternoon when she called the police, but it was not long after when the police called to say a body had been found in Church Woods.
It was all very reminiscent of the night their parents had died. Lula lost control of herself fairly quickly, but this time she begged Dakota to go and identify the body for her. As much as she wanted to refuse, she knew she couldn’t put her sister through the horror of seeing another dead loved one. It would have to be her, and she would have to be upset.
Lula’s state was deteriorating even before she left for the police station, so Dakota called the doctor out and got one of Lula’s work colleagues stay with her; she was pretty sure her sister would need sedating.
At the hospital, Dakota felt numb still, as she waited to be brought through to identify her sister’s fiancé. All feeling for him and what she had done seemed oddly absent and she was unsure if this was self-preservation or whether she really didn’t care at all about the fact that she had murdered her lover.
Everything seemed long drawn out, the walk to the mortuary was eternal, the corridors endless, but when she got there and the cloth was pulled back, it suddenly changed.
She stared at Jackson’s body and remembered that she had to be upset, but as she began to think about how to relate this to the people standing beside her she realised she was already sobbing, almost inconsolably, her entire body shaking with grief and loss. He was gone. The one thing that kept her going was gone forever. He would never look into her eyes again and make her feel like the only person in the world. He would never read poetry to her nor sing low and quiet in her ear about how she was her Loverman, till the bitter end.
She looked at him for only a second or two before turning away to sob, sudden guilt rising in her, quelled by turning from the body.
She pulled herself together fairly quickly and composed herself to answer any questions.
When they took her to sit down and gave her a glass of water, she heard words like: “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and “He must have been like a father to you.” There was a policeman there who told her it looked like murder and that they would need to know more about what Jackson had done the previous night, and as easy as that, the lies came.
“He was downstairs when I went to bed. I never heard him go out. Lula mustn’t have known either because when she went downstairs this morning she said she was going to have to wake him up,” she managed, wiping tears away with a withering tissue.
“Was he supposed to be asleep downstairs, then?”
“Yes, he always slept downstairs. Well, not always anymore, he mostly sleeps in with Lula now, but sometimes he doesn’t make it to bed before he falls asleep.”
After a few more questions they let her go home and break the news to Lula. They would be visiting the house in the next day or two to ask some more questions.
The journey home in the taxi was not long enough for Dakota to sort everything out in her head and before she knew it she was back home to face a sedated Lula and tell her that her fiancé was dead.
Lucky for Dakota, Lula’s friend offered to stay the night, which meant she could go and hide in her room and try to block out the sounds of wailing sobs that continued through till the early hours of the morning when Lula passed out from exhaustion and Dakota passed out from drinking a bottle of Jackson’s whisky.
The days that followed were difficult but, lucky for Dakota, their cousins rallied round to help out with watching over Lula.
The police called round the day after to ask more questions about Jackson’s movements and they eventually revealed that they were treating his death as murder.
“But who would want to murder my Jackson? He didn’t hurt anyone, didn’t have any enemies. I just don’t understand!” sobbed Lula as the detectives looked listlessly at her. Dakota felt like she was about to confess, scream suddenly that it was her, that he had been her lover and she had murdered him out of rage for spurn
ing her advances.
But instead she lit a cigarette and looked into the ashtray.
“Is his wallet here? Only there wasn’t one found on the body,” asked the detective who had introduced himself as Detective Finley.
Lula sat up and peered out into the hallway to see if his wallet was on the hall table where he always left it. She choked back a sob as she shook her head.
“I haven’t seen it anywhere else,” Dakota added to her sister’s silent response.
“So why do you think he would have gone out?” Finley asked. “I have no idea, but he did used to go out late sometimes, to the twenty-four-hour garage up the road if he ran out of fags,” offered Dakota steadily.
“Hmmm, but he would have no reason to visit the woods?” asked Finley, motioning to his companion to make some notes.
“No, not that we know of,” she replied holding onto her sister’s shaky hand.
“Could he have been meeting someone?”
Lula snapped out of her whimpering sob for a moment and looked up at Detective Finley.
“Who? Who would he have been meeting?” she asked, agitated.
“Well, I hoped you might be able to help me with that, but was it possible he was having an affair or in any trouble?”
“Uh, well, uh… no, of course not!” Lula stuttered, dragging her hair from her face. Dakota found herself looking at Lula suspiciously as though she knew more than her.
“Lula, was he having an affair?” she asked as her mind ran away with her.
“No!”
“OK, well if you think of any reasons why he might have been out there, can you let us know? It looks like a mugging gone wrong to us, but we will have to look into it further,” the Detective said as he and his colleague stood to leave. “I think we have bothered you enough today.”
Dakota saw them out, her heart thumping in her chest. She was suddenly terrified that she would be found out and put in prison, with Lula finally sent to a mental hospital.
Purgatory Hotel Page 22