Lula stood and opened the diary she was holding, beginning to read from it as the wind blew leaves across the clearing and she sauntered over to her kneeling sister.
“I can’t believe he’s gone, Diary, I can’t believe what I did. I didn’t intend to do it but the anger just took over when he said he wouldn’t leave Lula. I killed him. I killed my Jackson…” Lula slammed the book shut in Dakota’s face. “Interesting reading, hun! I have to admit I didn’t believe Jackson when he told me it was you who had killed him, but now I have read it all, it’s quite believable.”
“How did you find my diaries?” managed Dakota, shivering.
“Jackson told me where to find them, didn’t tell me what else I would discover about you when I read them though. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered you had been fucking my boyfriend since you were twelve!”
“He made me do it! I was just a child!”
“Save it, I have read it all, D, and there didn’t seem to be too much resistance from you. You’re right you were a child, and he should’ve known better. But you never made much of an effort to stop it, did you? You could’ve told someone!”
“You would never have believed me, and I was worried you would get sick…”
“Go mad, you mean? Just flip out?” Lula screamed at her, and suddenly punched Dakota in the face, knocking her back onto the floor, the diary pages scattering like freed birds.
“You’re right I would have, but believe me I would have taken your side cos you were only a child! Now I take no one’s side. You are both filthy fucking bastards!” Lula stepped back and by way of trying to calm down, lit herself a cigarette. Dakota winced slightly as she sat up, holding her bruised jaw and looking at her sister who was now staring at Jackson who was staring at Dakota.
“Lula… how long ago did you stop taking your medication?” Dakota asked as the thought that had occurred to her at the funeral crept into her mind again.
“A while ago. Jackson told me to, said they weren’t worth taking and that he wouldn’t be able to see me at night anymore if I was sleeping.”
“You shouldn’t have stopped taking them, Lula. You need them! You aren’t feeling yourself, are you? You have never hit me before. You need to calm down and realise that not taking your medication is making you sick.” Dakota tried to get through to her sister, but Lula was just shaking her head, still staring at Jackson.
“You are such a bastard!” muttered Lula to Jackson. “Of all the people you could have had an affair with you picked my baby sister? You are a fucking paedophile, just like that Goldman bloke next door. Did you used to get together and talk about fucking little girls?”
Jackson shook his head slowly without looking away from Dakota.
“Yes, and on the subject of Goldman, D, seems you have been keeping another pretty big secret for the last few years, haven’t you?” Lula returned her attention to Dakota whose thoughts had now turned to Michelle Taybury suddenly. “Yes, you know what I mean, that poor little girl, her poor family, and you knew all along, lied to the police over and over again. Mind you, you must be pretty good at lying by now. Been doing it for a while, haven’t you?”
“I’m… I’m sorry, Lula. Really I can’t explain it to you any other way than that I was thinking about how you would react…” and even as she said it she realised how stupid it sounded.
“Really? So when you were caught by Goldman you were thinking of me?”
“Yes.”
“Were you thinking of me when you were fucking my boyfriend right there in that grove? Were you thinking of me when you had your… abortion?” Lula could barely say the word and suddenly she was crying. A hysterical torrent of emotion escaped from her; she wailed as though someone had ripped her heart from her chest. And for the first time, Dakota felt complete guilt.
In such a small space in the heart of the woods, so much had happened. This clearing was off the beaten path by a long way, and while people had occasionally stumbled upon the Witch Tree, nobody would find it at night. Dakota was aware of this as she sat before the tree. Just beyond it lay the quiet, secret grove, and she knew somewhere deep down that as she had lived her secret life out there in those woods, so her secret life would die out there too. Nobody would chance upon them now, just as no one had chanced upon her and Jackson the night she had killed him.
She was suddenly very aware that she was about to die.
The pages of her diaries rustled around the clearing, and reminded her that now, she had no secrets. Lula knew everything, about the abortion, about Michelle Taybury’s murder and about how she and Jackson had been having sex while she laid in her drugged sleep night after night only a few metres away.
Poor fragile Lula. All the hard work she had done over the years to get over the grief of her siblings’ tiny deaths, and the death of their parents would now be undone. Any security Lula had ever felt would now be gone, smashed to pieces by a handful of notebooks and secrets.
“I should have known, I should have seen it. Maybe I would have if I wasn’t full of drugs and romantic notions,” Lula muttered bitterly into the piles of torn paper that lay around her. “I am so stupid. All those times I thought I was getting you two to get along by leaving you alone, I was just giving you more time to betray me. Oh my god! My God, it’s all my fault!”
“No Lula, it wasn’t your fault…” Dakota began but realised her sister wasn’t listening. She was in a world of her own, a nightmare of memories.
“If I hadn’t asked Jackson to live with us he never could have had the chance to get near you like that! I invited him to take you! And I forced you to be alone so he could do it over and over again. I might as well have given my consent! I let him rape you. I made him bring you back when you ran away! My God, what have I done?”
The night fell silent save for Lula’s sobs. Even the wildlife had abandoned the place where the two girls and the spectre performed the last act of the play.
Then suddenly Lula stopped crying. Dakota looked at her sister heaped on the forest floor, her hair covering her face, and slowly Lula’s eyes raised, glinting, up from the ground and focused on Dakota. Neither of them moved as they stared across the littered floor at each other.
“You wanted him back and he didn’t want you anymore so you killed him. You came back from Ireland to get him and he didn’t want you,” Lula half whispered.
“Yes. He said he wanted you and that it was over between us.” Dakota felt relief in her stomach, as though this might be the thing to calm Lula down, the fact that in the end Jackson had wanted her.
“But if he had said yes, you would have stolen him from me finally. You would have left me and taken him with you, wouldn’t you?” Dakota had no answer that would make anything better so she just sat silent. “But he should have known better than to turn you down, shouldn’t he? He should have known it would never be over…”
Something rational clicked in Dakota’s mind. She had not written about what actually happened that night in her diary; she only wrote that she had killed him and did not have it in her to record the details of the murder.
How did Lula know what had been said? Unless Jackson had told her.
But why would Jackson give her all the details? God knows Jackson had never told Lula the details of anything in his life. Why would he choose that evening to let it all out, tell each damning, maddening detail?
Jackson wanted Lula to kill Dakota.
And in that moment that Dakota realised, that was when it happened.
Lula stood up, leaves in her hair, madness in her eyes and began to speak again.
“It doesn’t matter what way I look at it, D. It’s all very simple. You had an affair with my boyfriend for nine years, you murdered an unborn baby, you let a small girl go to her death at the hands of a paedophile and you murdered my boyfriend, your Loverman. Three people are dead because of you, Dakota Crow. If it were possible that you could die three times, maybe that would be payment enough. But you can’t.”
In split seconds, Lula had launched herself at her sister and was upon her, raining blows on her head with a strength Dakota did not know her sister had. In a brief pause as Lula lifted her arms above her head, Dakota noticed the rock in her sister’s white hands. In the second that followed, as the rock made its way towards Dakota’s head, her eyes dropped and she saw Jackson standing a few feet away, watching, waiting.
Her body had no register for the sort of pain she was in. Blow after blow with the rock she slipped away, and pain had no part in it, only numbness and fear.
In the seconds before everything stopped, her life passed before her in a random barrage of images that arrived like photographs slipping past her eyes.
Her mother kneading the scone mix, her father polishing his motorcycle, Lula styling her hair and laughing in front of a mirror, the photo on her hallway of the Dakota Badlands, the blue dress her mother was wearing the night she died, her father looking smart in his suit as he closed the car door forever, the first second she laid eyes on Jackson, the hug he gave her as she wept at the hospital, “ a murder of crows” he had said, and the words of a Baudelaire poem he only ever said in French, steady autumn rain falling on the garden and the first fall of apples, rain on the churchyard , the face of Michelle Taybury, the photos Goldman had sent her of her and Jackson making love, tears on Lula’s face, Jackson’s eyes, Jackson’s cold blue eyes.
And she was gone.
THIRTY-SIX: The After-Life
Dakota was not crying, but there were tears on her face. She felt as though her soul was leaking, but no sobs came.
Jackson was staring straight at her and smoking a cigarette.
She couldn’t find any words to say, and the last thoughts before her death continued to fall across her vision as she lit a cigarette for herself.
“Poor Lula, what did we do to her?” she said, her voice cracking slightly with dryness.
“It wasn’t our fault, D. When are you going to realise that?” Jackson tutted and shook his head.
“You took advantage of me; you were a paedophile!” She wanted to shout at him for his indifference.
“Did you ever see me look at another child? Did you ever suspect I might leave you once you got too old? Do you think I wanted you because you were a child?” he asked her steadily, as though he had expected he might have to ask her this for some time. “And you remember that first time, it wasn’t me who instigated it, D; it was you. I tried to stop you.”
“But I was a child! And you turned me into a bitch of an adult as well!”
“That was incidental. Have you learnt nothing since you’ve been dead? WE were supposed to be together, just as we always have been in every life. There have been obstacles, but we always came together anyway.”
“Yes, and then you murdered me!” she said incredulously.
“Yes, I did, because you always tried to leave me, when I knew we should never have been apart. If I had known about our past lives, I would never have said I would leave you, and you would never have murdered me. It was our last chance, D, and we fucked it up.”
“I knew about our past lives – my dreams, remember? I knew you had killed me before, and I thought you would do it again one day. But I got you first…”
“And here we are, and it’s too late,” he sighed, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. “No matter what way you look at it, I always knew we belonged together, in every life we went through, and you always thought you knew better! You were the one who ran away, and I was always the one to stop you. But last time I didn’t; I waited for you to come back and when you did, I wanted you to beg. I didn’t think you would kill me!” He laughed the way he always did, without smiling. “One thing you don’t know and couldn’t because you never got to read any of my books; was that I committed suicide in every life after I had killed you. I killed you and in doing so removed my reason for living. Every time. Every time except the last.”
“What God would put two souls together over and over if they could only harm each other? And what God would put us together when I was a child and you were an adult? Every time, we were put in a situation where we were not allowed to be together, and every time the rules got broken and ruined our lives!”
“Perhaps we were a game? Maybe he wanted to see if we could resist temptation?”
“Oh fuck off, Jackson. Why would he bother?”
“To see if he had any control over human nature?”
Something Ariel had said to her jumped back up in her mind: how God could not control humans because he had given them free will.
Whatever the game, Dakota knew that somehow her soul was tied forever to Jackson’s and in that lay the ruination of many lives and lifetimes.
“You know, there was never anything beautiful about my life, until I met you. You were the first and only truly beautiful thing I ever had. I knew, the second I saw you, that I loved you, that moment I saw you sat on your sofa at home, a little ten-year-old girl, whose eyes I knew from lifetimes ago. For some reason, something I could not explain, you were more than a child to me, and I never questioned myself for that reason. From the outside I knew how it looked, but I knew how it felt and I had no choice. I loved you in a way I thought was only possible in books, but you made it all real.
I knew it would be harder for you because you were so young, but I also knew that in time you would realise that you felt the same. I know I did it all wrong, but there was no easy way of doing it. How could I have a relationship with a young girl without being called a paedophile? That is why I stayed with Lula, so I could hide behind the façade of a normal relationship until you were old enough to become accepted as my lover.”
“Shit Jackson, you really have read ‘Lolita’ once too often. Why didn’t you just kill Lula off and run away with me?” she mocked, shaking her head.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, D. We’re dead and we’re paying for what we have done. Don’t pretend you don’t care about us,” he snapped and lit another cigarette.
Dakota noticed that the world of Purgatory was still continuing around her. Lightning still bleached the room occasionally, the rain still battered the windows and the distant sound of another soul in torment still shivered in the air.
“I watched you die, Dakota, just as you watched me die. I stood there and watched. You had the eyes of a spooked horse, frantic, losing control. I saw that panic turn to calm as somewhere inside you began to die. I knew that you were seeing your life flash before your eyes… amazing. I always thought that was just a myth, but it does really happen. I could see it there, the acceptance that it was all over, and you were seeing all the things you loved best about life, the things that you hated most, too, probably. It was amazing, watching you go, seeing you slip away like that. You were never more beautiful.” He spoke more animatedly than Dakota could ever recall. In life he had only ever seemed so alive when reading from a book, a poem or some prose, but always someone else’s words. But these were his words and he wasn’t afraid to say them. There was something like blue fire in his eyes and she couldn’t tear her gaze from him. As thunder crashed outside, Dakota snapped out of her trance.
“Did you want Lula to kill me? Is that why you came back and told her about my diaries?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right. I came back at first just to see you. That first morning you awoke without me, I know you saw me. And once I had seen you again I knew I had to make sure we were together again. Plus I was sort of pissed off with you for killing me so I thought it was only fair you met a similar end.” He smiled wickedly at her before continuing. “So I came back as often as I could to watch you, and eventually found out where you had hidden your diaries all these years. I had never considered that you would hide them under the floorboards when you had a fitted carpet in your room, but there you were, pulling back the carpet and lifting floorboards to reveal a pile of notebooks dating back to before I even laid eyes on you. I knew that was all I would need to tip Lula over the ed
ge.”
“You made her a killer! Now she won’t go to Heaven either; she will end up here with us! Why did you have to do that? Ruin her afterlife as well as her life? What if she gets charged with my murder?”
“She won’t; they’ll think Goldman did it,” he said, a smile creeping across his thin face.
“What? Why?”
“Well, Lula will get on her acting shoes and make out that you were being stalked by the missing murderer, the diary confirms you knew each other and that he had attacked you before. When they find your body, Lula will ‘discover’ your hidden diaries, the ones she didn’t rip to pieces, and not only will she prove the connection between you and Goldman, she will prove that you murdered me! Lula and I had it planned all along. You told your diary that the only person who knew about me and you was him and that since his recent sightings, you were afraid he had come back for you, having guessed you had murdered me. So he lured you out to the woods, and murdered you because he believed you had turned him over to the police. That’s the story she will tell them when they find your body. Until then they think you have run away. Lula told them you had done it loads of times before,” he explained.
“But Goldman is dead! He arrived just after me,” Dakota exclaimed.
“No, he arrived a long time before you, but he just couldn’t bring himself to leave those woods, till you showed up. I know he was already dead because I killed him.” The ease with which he confessed to murder caught Dakota by surprise. There had always been the possibility that he had killed Goldman but it was never real to her, just a thought. Maybe there was always a part of her that didn’t want to believe Jackson was capable of murder after all.
“Jackson! I thought he ran away!”
“No, he tried to blackmail me while you were in Ireland, so I met him out in the woods to pay him off and decided to kill him instead. I buried him behind the base of the Witch Tree and went back to his place to take away the photos of us and pack a bag for Goldman to disappear with. I messed up the house, to make it look like he had left in a hurry, it wasn’t long after that, by coincidence, that his brother showed up looking for him. He reported him missing and when the police turned up they had all the evidence they needed that he had murdered all those little girls.”
Purgatory Hotel Page 25