She contemplated the same questions as she found herself coming back through the door into the Purgatory Hotel lobby.
She felt suddenly weak and feeble. Her legs gave way under her and she hit the floor hard. Arms wrapped around her and carried her to a chair, where she sat to regain composure.
“You’ll be OK in a moment. It must have been a shock for you,” said a voice she recognised. Dakota looked up to see Ariel leaning over her, her unearthly blue eyes burning coolly in her face.
“I saw myself... it was awful,” Dakota managed before tears came to her eyes again.
“Do you want me to take you to Danny?”
“Yes... yes please… thank you Ariel.”
“He missed you. So did Betty,” said Ariel as she helped Dakota to her feet and manoeuvred her towards the Bar.
“Betty?”
“Yes, she must like you. She actually left her room to try and find you when you didn’t come back.”
“Was I gone for a long time? I guess I would be – I must have been there for about eighteen hours,” muttered Dakota, counting on her fingers.
“Yes, that’s around three weeks here! Betty was quite worried. She thought the crazies had carried you off into the woods. She said someone had been in your room?”
“Yeah, someone broke in and... put a poem in my bed.”
“I’m afraid you can’t stop criminals from being criminals. You’d think their incarceration would make them change, but it doesn’t.” Ariel shrugged as she pushed the door to the Bar open.
Danny came rushing across the dark room to take over from Ariel.
“Geez girl, I was starting to worry you wouldn’t come back!” he said franticly, throwing Dakota’s arm over his shoulder.
“Thank you, Ariel,” Dakota said softly as her helper smiled and left the Bar.
Danny guided her to a table close to the bar and sat her down.
“Where did you go?”
“To my death,” she said weakly and took a cigarette from his offered hand. Someone in the shadows began to choke on his cigarette, and table lamps shuddered in the draught that whistled through from some cracked window somewhere. Danny went away to the bar and brought back a glass and some vodka. Dakota took one sip and spat it back out.
“I can’t drink that shit anymore!” A low cackle rose out of the distant corner of the Bar, but Dakota ignored it, instead looking past the oil lamp into Danny’s lined face.
“OK, what did you see?” he said, pushing the bottle aside.
In a low voice, Dakota told him everything she had seen, and also about the poem in her room.
“Ahh, that’s probably some fella’s idea of fun – I wouldn’t worry about that. You get plenty of people trying to shake others up.” He paused and blew cigarette smoke from the corner of his wide mouth. “At least you know how you died, now. That’s something.”
“Yeah I know, but that doesn’t explain why I’m here! I was the victim. What had I done to deserve that or this? I was upset at first, now I’m just fucking angry!”
“OK, OK, it will all come back. Don’t worry,” he said and patted her hand.
“Do you know about the Library of Remembrance?” she whispered to him. An odd look flashed across his face. She almost thought it was fear, but dismissed it.
“Yeah, I heard of it, like. Not heard of it from a lot of people though.”
“Do you know what it is? Or where it is?”
“No, sorry love, I don’t,” he replied abruptly. “I think you should go and lie down for a while. You need to rest after that.”
“Yeah, whatever,” she sighed and got up. After staggering slightly, she moved out of the Bar, ready to thump anyone who even looked at her. She felt that Danny was being deliberately unhelpful, and didn’t know why. Whatever the reason, she would just have to find the library alone.
TEN: The Library of Remembrance
Dakota turned down the hallway she had investigated before. It was still as dimly lit, the lamps flickered in and out of existence on the dying walls, the floor below her feet was still littered with bottles and cigarette butts.
A tiny thread of fear tightened around her stomach as the darkness closed in around her, but she felt determined that no one was going to stop her from finding the library. She had no idea why she needed to go there, but if nothing else perhaps she might find out who wrote the poem. The name of the author might mean something… anything. Anything was good enough for her now. She was so desperate to know what had happened in her life that she would take any help, even the help of a voice from another room whose owner she had no knowledge of, even though he could have sent her here to trick her, and the library might not even exist.
As the thoughts raced through her head, she kept telling herself that she had to just see if the information she had been given was of any use.
The hallway stretched on, occasional cobwebs brushing her face. She even suspected some other people were in the corridor too, but they were hiding in the shadows, watching her. As she went further and further into the bowels of the hotel, she began to see people – the back of a head, an arm, a leg, never the full picture – as the silent strangers drifted in and out of the dense shadows that lined the corridors like sentinels. She heard murmurs bringing the dark to life. The deep shadows had a voice, sounding like many lost bitter souls whispering bleak warnings and trickery in her ears. She could occasionally pick out a word or two: “little girl,” “mistake,” “wrong way,” “trouble,” “go back.” They drawled out of the dark, the words like flies buzzing around her aching head, making her skin crawl. She had the perception that hands were reaching out, brushing against her body, trying to feel her with invisible fingers.
Blocking out the faint words and hands, Dakota realised she could not even see if there were any doors, so turned to one of the wall lamps to see if it would come off the wall. Her hands found the wrought iron base growing from the bottom of the glass shade that protected the flame inside. Sweeping cobwebs aside, shuddering slightly as spiders ran across her fingers, she tugged gently at the lamp where it met the wall. A tiny sprinkling of plaster powdered her knuckles and she tugged again. This time the whole lamp came cleanly out of the wall, chunks of plaster thumping to the floor at her feet, and she stumbled back across the hallway, the oil in the lamp sloshing about and causing the flame to flicker nervously.
“That’s better,” Dakota muttered to herself, pleased that she had a source of light she could carry herself, instead of relying on the sparse and unfaithful hall lighting. It seemed that as long as she was holding the lamp, it did not suffer from the same sickness as all the other lamps that shifted in and out of life. Movement and whispers scuttled beyond her vision as she continued on, fear still tightening in her belly. She began to inspect the walls looking for doors, but there were none – just peeling wallpaper and insects. She could not see any more residents; they seemed to have decided not to come as far in as she was. Still she felt as though someone was behind her, leading her to suspect the occupants of this corridor were more comfortable sticking to the shadows. Speeding up slightly, she did her best to ignore the feeling and took in everything the light cast by her lamp allowed her to see. Bottles no longer littered the floor, just dust and insects. It felt to her that no one had come this far up in the corridor for some time, but other footprints in the thick dust on the floor told her otherwise.
After walking for some fifteen minutes she came across a door on the left-hand side of the corridor. At the side of the door was a plaque, covered in cobwebs and dust that Dakota had to wipe away before she could read it.
“The Library of Remembrance,” she whispered as her eyes scanned the engraved plaque. As she put her hand on the gilt doorknob, someone kicked a bottle up the corridor behind her. They were about twenty feet away, she guessed, although she couldn’t see a shape or silhouette in the dim light down the hall. As the fear tightened, she turned the handle and pushed the door in far enough for her to get arou
nd it before closing it behind her.
The room she was in was also poorly lit, but there were more lights dotted around. They revealed high blocks of shelves containing hundreds of leather-bound books with gold writing on the spines. She could not tell how far up they went, nor could she see how long the room was as it all just seemed to fade into the distance as far as her eyes could see, but the little lamps continued to glow far off in the distant shadows, taking on the appearance of stars in the gloom. It was not a wide room. A high bookshelf stood a few feet away, and beyond that stood another up against the wall. A tall window beside it flashed as the storm threw itself at the hotel, and momentarily the room was awash with light, highlighting the thickening cyst of dust that lay over every surface, from the tops of the books to the long table that sat below the window. The rain continued at the mercy of the howling winds that threw its course from the window pane back into the endless night.
She could not tell if there was anyone else in the room, but a continuous noise permeated the dark. It sounded like tiny scratching, as though a million mice were alive in the room, scuttling beyond her lamplight. As she moved into the room, it seemed to get louder, so she followed her ears to the nearest bookshelf and lifted her lamp up to read the spines of the books. They all bore names of people: Mary Jane Barrows, Mary Kerry Barrows and on and in alphabetical order. Intrigued, she pulled down a heavy volume entitled Matthew Arnold Barron. It seemed to be the heaviest book she had ever held and she almost dropped her lamp as its weight surprised her into an unsteady wobble and a few swear words. Dropping to her knees, she rested the book on the floor, leaning the lamp precariously against the wall.
The scratching noise grew as she pulled open the heavy binding and looked at the first page. She read in flowing script:
The Life of Matthew Arnold Barron, formerly known as Henri Luc Pepin.
Dakota shrugged and pushed the pages on until she found the words: Matthew was born in 1963 to Frank and Maria Barron.
It went on to describe his birth and early childhood, and Dakota took it to be a biography of some kind. Grabbing a thick wad of pages, she flicked towards the back of the book. About three quarters of the way through, she stopped to discover the source of the scratching. The life of Matthew Barron was being written right before her eyes. Words appeared on the pages as though some spider was running across the large paper, leaving a trail of ink behind it, all the time scratching like the sound of a quill nib on thick paper. Dakota recalled seeing the same thing happening on the hotel register, but she still couldn’t believe her eyes. Suddenly the writing stopped. As she leaned closer to the book, she read that Matthew Barron had just died.
Dakota put the book back on the shelf and decided she should start looking for the book bearing her name. She wondered if it would still be recording what she was doing. Or would its pages be silent, bereft of the scratching ink that recorded her life, silent since the moment she had died?
As she moved along the shelves, she marvelled at the thousands of names – all these people who had been alive or were still alive now, totally unaware that somewhere their biography was being penned by invisible hands. She had to walk a long way to get to the area where her name would be, only to discover that her book was probably about ten shelves up towards the ceiling. To her right she could see a ladder that ran all the way up to the shady top shelf. A light tug revealed that it rolled along the length of the bookcase on castors, so holding her lamp in one hand, she began to climb up in search of her book.
The air was full of dust, and it smelt ancient. From the depths of her mind she recalled how second-hand bookshops smelt of old paper and damp. Words from someone else’s mind mouldering on pages unread for decades, useless and lonely. Looking around briefly, she could see lamps set at intervals along the bookcases, but the shadows in the room appeared to be winning the battle for control of the huge endless library. The continuous scratching began to become a background noise to Dakota. The millions of words being penned in the millions of books had no definition. It was just a low hum of perpetual sound, the events that brightened or shattered lives reduced to a dull scratching.
Dakota searched amongst the hundreds of books belonging to the Crow surname, until at last she found it. A huge leather-bound spine, embossed in gold lettering: Dakota Grace Crow. Her volume was thinner than others around it, which made sense, she realised, for her life had been so very short in comparison to some. She hadn’t even outlived her grandparents on her father’s side; if she looked she would find most probably that grandmother Crow was swearing at the television, still unaware that her youngest grandchild was dead. Granddad Crow was most likely making yet another model of an aeroplane that he would go and hang up with all the others in his dead son’s old bedroom. The books that bore their life stories would be about three times as thick as Dakota’s.
However, she was not in the dusty old library to read about her grandparents; she was there to read her own life story. So, nervously, she reached for her book and yanked it off the shelf, her lifetime of dust suddenly disturbed. Surprisingly, it was not as dusty as Matthew Barron’s had been. Had someone read about her while she was still alive? Perhaps some dead relative. Pausing for a moment, she listened to see if her book was still alive with the scratching of words. But it was not. Silence drifted out of the pages to her, her life was over, nothing left to say about the girl she used to be. On the earth, her body was already decaying, her heart as quiet as the book she now held in her hands.
No matter, she thought. She had some reading to do, and began to descend the wooden ladder, the book clamped under the arm that also held the lamp.
When she reached the floor, she wandered off in search of a place to sit – there had to be some chairs somewhere. After walking a shadowy length of book case, she found a group of tables and chairs. They bore an undisturbed veil of dust, and the oil lamps that sat on them sent out a dim light from under a thick layer of grey cobwebs.
Turning off her own lamp and leaning it against the leg of the nearest table, she laid her book down on the dusty table, and watched as a cloud rose up around it and danced sluggishly in the light.
As she pulled out the chair and went to sit down, she noticed another person sat at the same table. The man had a mass of wild white hair and a look in his eyes that made her think of a frightened animal. He had a book laid out before him, and from a cursory look, she could see he was about half-way through reading it.
“Hi,” she said unsurely as she sat down. “Didn’t expect to see anyone else here.”
“You are only the third other person I have ever seen in here. I hear people here but never see them,” he replied, his voice low and wispy. “I come here all the time. I just go away to sleep for a while then I come back. Feels like I have been reading this book for ten years. Maybe I have?”
“Is it… about you?” she asked, looking across at his book, which was somewhat thicker than her own.
“Yes, it’s mine,” he said almost sadly, his eyes falling down onto the pages before him. “I don’t want to remember it all, but I can’t seem to stop reading… like I am addicted to it. Sometimes I just have to stop and put it away, go and have a drink at the bar. I didn’t come back here for weeks after I first read it. I got as far as my eighth birthday and couldn’t handle it anymore.” He stopped talking and ran a withered hand through his mane of hair.
“Did you have a... um… bad life?”
“No! That’s why it’s so hard to read. It was wonderful. I was loved and looked after. But when I grew up, I fucked it all up. I… made such a mess and now I am here in this awful place and reading how… how good I had it. What a joke.” He shook his head and a tear rolled down his drawn grey cheek. “Perhaps you are best off not reading that book if it’s about you.”
Dakota looked down at her own book, its pages a mystery to her beneath the red leather and her golden name.
“I have to read it. I just need to remember… I can’t remember what I d
id to be sent here. I don’t remember anything about my life, except the first ten years,” she explained.
“Hmm, perhaps you forgot the rest of your life for a good reason?” he said, almost whispering.
“Yeah maybe, but I can’t atone if I don’t know what I did wrong, can I?” He nodded and looked back down to his own book.
“If I could forget, I would. I’d never read this book. I’d be happy to be ignorant,” he muttered dimly, probably more to himself than to Dakota.
Deciding that she would never get anywhere if she didn’t look, she opened the book at the first page.
The life of Dakota Grace Crow, formerly known as Miriam Diana Page.
“Sorry to bother you, but what does this ‘formerly known as’ stuff mean?” she asked the white-haired man.
“That’s what your name was last time,” he replied without looking up.
“Last time?”
“Your last incarnation, before the one you remember. You know what reincarnation is, don’t you?”
“Uh... yeah, actually I do. So it does exist? People really are reincarnated?” She suddenly was amazed at her recollection of her previous belief in it.
“Oh yes, it usually happens around five or six times, until you reach the final judgement. And here we are. We have had our turn. Time to atone for what we have done with our lives. You only remember when you read the books. Some people remember past lives through dreams and such, but it’s only patchy. You only get the full picture from reading the books.”
Purgatory Hotel Page 6
