She felt strange, as though her body was new. She was not a virgin anymore; the great mystery of sex had been unravelled in her by her sister’s boyfriend late in a hot summer night with the sound of music in the air.
She couldn’t look at Lula because she remembered the words Jackson had said as he made ready to leave her room when it was over.
“You know what would happen if Lula found out, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she had replied, knowing she could not see her sister’s dream of Jackson shatter. Lula had enough heartaches. It would surely kill her if she knew, so Dakota could never tell her anything about it. There was a threat to Lula, but Dakota also felt there was a threat to her in what he said. She did not know this man very well, and something in his eyes scared her and said he could really hurt her if he wanted to.
Jackson looked at her across the breakfast table as Lula fluttered about behind him fixing his food.
“Are you OK?” he asked. When she looked up she saw concern in his eyes and she almost cried. What had happened was wrong, she knew that. She shouldn’t have kissed him, he shouldn’t have let her. But it had happened and she had enjoyed it. It was her own guilt that weighed heavy on her that morning. She had seduced her sister’s boyfriend just so that she could not feel alone anymore. And she didn’t even regret it.
She was aware, and had been for a long time, that there was a place in her heart that was empty. She felt it late at night, a lonely echoey room in her heart, with high ceilings and no windows; the wind whistled through it, accentuating its emptiness.
That hot July night, Dakota had felt that space was filled. And in the morning, she could still feel it. Jackson’s presence filled her stomach and chest like a multitude of startled butterflies. The touch of his hand on her skin was a proximity she had felt with no man, not even her father. He had loved her, she knew, but he had rarely hugged her, never put his hands on her for more than a second. But Jackson had put his hands all over her, had seen into her soul with his bright blue eyes and made her feel, for the first time since her parents died, that she existed. Even when her parents were alive, a lot of their attention was devoted to Lula and her mental problems. Since that fateful night, Lula had done her best to play mum, but her medicated state and her busyness with work meant she had put Dakota after Jackson in her affections. Lula needed Jackson more, to make her feel safe and chase away the demons in her head.
Dakota knew Lula loved her, but she didn’t always feel it.
She also knew that she should never have let Jackson touch her, and that what they had done was dirty.
But deep down a tiny voice said it didn’t matter, that Jackson loved her and would always make her feel good and needed. Half-sickened, half-yearning, she returned to her room and poured the contents of her mind into her diary.
The following night, Dakota sat in her room, lights out, by the open window again. Lula had gone to bed an hour earlier and since then Jackson had been downstairs.
She had been listening to his music trailing up the stairs for the last hour when it stopped abruptly in the middle of a song. Then, a new song began.
“There’s a devil waiting outside your door…”
She heard a faint creak on the stairs and her stomach twisted with anticipation as a shadow fell across the beam of light that seeped under her door.
“He’s bucking and braying and pawing at the floor,
Well he’s howling with pain and crawling up the walls,
There’s a devil waiting outside your door,
He’s weak with evil and broken by the world
He’s shouting your name and he’s asking for more…”
Dakota got up and moved over to the bed, her entire body trembling and an odd feeling growing beneath her belly button.
“Loverman! Since the world began!”
The door opened suddenly and the silhouette with long hair and a strong body was briefly visible before the door closed again and she could hear him moving towards her. When he reached her, he placed his hand softly on the side of her face for a moment before bringing her toward him for a kiss. His tongue slipped into her mouth and she responded hungrily before her guilt kicked in and she struggled against him for a moment. But as his hand slipped down her body into her knickers, she began to go limp in his arms, giving in, knowing that no matter how wrong it was, it would feel good.
Tears pricked her eyes as he entered her sore body. She’d had no time to recover from the previous night and he hurt her no matter how gentle his thrusts were. Yet through the pain another orgasm wracked her small body.
“Loverman! Here I stand for ever Amen
Cause I am what I am what I am what I am
Forgive me baby, my hands are bound
And I got no choice, no, I got no choice at all...”
“Are you OK?” he asked, hearing her sniffling in the darkness.
“It hurt a bit,” she replied.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I don’t want to hurt you, D,” he said softly and held her small hand, weaving his long fingers through hers.
They lay together. He pulled her into his arms for an embrace and she laid her head on his chest, remembering again the night her parents had died and how he had wrapped her up in his coat and wordlessly soothed her.
Downstairs the CD played on, a mixture of highs and lows with a deep melancholy threaded through.
She expected him to get up and leave as he had the night before, but he stayed with her, lay in the dark, breeze-stirred room. They smoked cigarettes and Dakota thought it was like in the movies when two people made love then lay together smoking.
As the CD drew to a close downstairs, the singer’s voice asked sadly, over and over, half-pleading, if they were loved. And she wondered, too, for a moment, did he love her?
From that night on, everything slipped into a kind of routine. Jackson came to her nearly every night, and the nights he did not come creeping into her room, she would lie awake and alone, wondering what kept him from coming.
Some nights he stayed and read to her, passages from ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Lolita,’ and she never asked him to do it even though she secretly hoped every night that he would take up a book from her bedside table and begin to say those words that spoke of great yet obsessive love. The nights he did not come to her, she would read them alone, remembering how the words sounded when they came from his mouth. She took down her religious pictures and turned the pictures of her parents to the wall before climbing into bed at night, feeling that they could no longer see what went on in her life if she hid it from their faces.
And while his occasional absence was a relief to her, she also found that she missed him.
Lula remained unaware of what happened in the house when she fell into her drug-induced slumber, and Jackson and Dakota continued to communicate briefly and civilly when in Lula’s company. Lula continued to try as hard as she could to communicate with Dakota, and Dakota returned the attention knowing that Lula’s mind was often on other things. Throughout the whole summer holiday, Dakota spent every day on her own, either walking in the nearby woods, or reading quietly in the house. Her diary filled up with her feelings about what went on at night, when the dark-haired man would crawl up the stairs, whisky on his breath, cigarette smoking in his fingers and a strength growing in his jeans.
Dakota often thought about what would happen if she told Lula. Would she slap her? Collapse? Scream? She felt she would call her a liar and say she was jealous of her and Jackson. Maybe she would kick her out, or Jackson. Or would she go insane and finally kill herself?
Dakota knew there was no way she could ever tell her.
She couldn’t tell anyone how she felt, so she wrote it all down.
One afternoon while she was at home alone, she found herself wandering around, picking up Jackson’s things, his CDs, his books, turning them over in her hands as though they would bring her some sort of understanding of how he was feeling.
He never sa
id anything, nothing of his own. There was a part of her that needed to know why he was doing it all. She needed something, some ammunition to make it easier for her to hate him. Suddenly she was rummaging feverishly through his belongings, looking for his notebooks, the red and black notebooks he was always scribbling in but that he never left lying about to be read. What was he writing?
She stood on the sofa and looked at the bookshelves higher up that she couldn’t normally reach and noticed that one section of books was standing out further than the others. Behind a bunch of her dad’s old books was Jackson’s book.
Once she had it in her hands she began to shake. Guilt took over her even before she began to open the pages. She was breaking in to Jackson’s brain, she was snooping. And even though she knew he was miles away at work, she felt like he was there, breathing down her neck.
She began to leaf through the pages, some entries dated, but all the pages were different, some filled with drawings, others with poems and most with straightforward prose, almost like a diary. She felt some sort of peace reading his words, like the words proved he was human, not some figment of her imagination. Not knowing how long she had, she opened the first page and read.
Today I met the love of my life. I never thought it would happen but it has. The strangest thing. When our eyes met it was like we had known each other forever, something inside of us that we didn’t have to say out loud. That’s it. You can stop looking now because I’m here. I’m here. But I can’t have her. I’m not crazy, I know it’s her, it’s like I know her soul, but I can’t be with her. She’s too young. Too young.
Dakota smiled to herself to see he was so passionate even when he used his own words. She flipped forward through poems about trees and love until she found a dated entry from the night after he first came to her room.
I’m sitting down here and I know she is awake up there. God, how can I stand it? I just wanted to be in the same room as her, sitting in silence with someone else who understands loneliness. Every night she sits up there awake and I sit down here. And then suddenly she was kissing me. I tried to hold her off but once I had felt her lips it was harder not to let her kiss me again and again. I’ve never felt that before. Like our lips meeting created something I had no control over. It was wrong, so so wrong. But she made me feel…. I don’t even know what words to use. All my poems and fancy prose are useless to me now. She made me feel something I can’t even find the words for. I want to be beside her so much my heart hurts. Just to feel that calm again. Every day since I met her has been the same, I feel equal parts blessed and damned, like she is my saviour and yet still the end of me. I always knew from the first time I laid eyes on her that she was important. I just didn’t know why. When I looked at her this morning I couldn’t even see her like I used to, I see endless lifetimes receding into the trees, I see eternity.
“Hello?” A voice in the hallway broke her from her trance. It was Lula. Dakota snapped into action, climbing back up the bookshelf to stuff the book back into its hiding place.
Even while she was hugging Lula to say hello she was thinking that she wanted more of his words. She felt so much love in her heart, she thought it might burst.
One year after the first time, almost to the day, Dakota's nightmares began.
After the first, they came irregularly, once or twice a week, and she woke every time soaked in sweat, grabbing blindly for the light to make sure that the sticky, wet residue covering her body was not blood.
The dream varied but was basically the same every time.
It was always night-time. She was either in a house she did not recognise, a forest, a cemetery or by a river. Wherever it was, she was always crying angry, hot tears, and Jackson was always there, screaming back at her.
“You said you loved me! You can’t finish this!”
“It’s wrong; it’s always been wrong!”
“No, we are meant to be together and you know it! You just can’t accept that you are as dirty as me, and that you love the way I make you feel. You’re just a coward!”
“Just go, leave me alone. This ends now! Tonight! It had to end sometime. Did you really think that it could go on forever? You knew it would end someday.”
Suddenly he stepped forward, grabbed her by her shoulders and began kissing her passionately. She, unable to resist him, reciprocated through her tears.
“And you should know by now,” he whispered, “this is never over!”
A sharp burning pain in her ribs came first, then stumbling back in the rainy graveyard, thumping into a tomb as she looked down at the blood pouring down her. In his hands the knife glittered red, rain diluting it over his fingers. And in the moments before darkness swam into her eyes, he began to sob, his face streaming with rain.
In similar dreams, he strangled her in a house – the beautiful and glamorous home of a wealthy person, the moon at the window peering in. The last sight she saw, the last sound she heard, was his weeping.
In the woods, he gave her no warning as he stove her skull in with a rock, sobbing wildly against the sounds of the animals flickering in the undergrowth.
Then, in the shadow of trees by a rushing river, he held her head beneath the torrent until all faded into black.
The location and method of murder differed but his last words to her never changed.
“You should know by now, this is never over!”
The dreams were so vivid that they always left her shaken. Panic continued in her waking as she searched for the knife wound, the garrotte or the blood pouring from her broken skull. Sometimes she awoke unable to breathe, trying to cough up river water that moments before had been swilling around in her lungs.
Then, as reality dawned, and the light revealed a sweat-soaked nightdress, Dakota would collapse back into her bed, weak and tired from her struggle to survive.
Her dreams made her feel slightly more nervous around Jackson and she recognised more than ever that sharp edge to his eyes that had frightened her when she first met him. One morning, after a particularly bloody episode in the rain-drenched cemetery, Jackson touched her mischievously behind Lula’s back, but the contact made her jump so much that she cut her finger open with the bread knife she was holding.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Jackson as Lula switched the tap on for her bloody-handed sister.
“Did you slip?” she asked Dakota, who looked pale and sweaty. “You feeling under the weather?” Lula touched her sister’s clammy forehead.
“Yeah, a bit. I didn’t sleep too well, might be coming down with something,” offered Dakota weakly as the blood disappeared in the cold water.
Lula left the room to fetch a plaster, and Dakota found she could not meet Jackson’s gaze.
“You trying to make her suspicious or something? What’s wrong with you? Why won’t you look at me?”
“Sorry, you made me jump,” she answered, staring down at her hand.
“You’ve been like this for a month now. Every time I come near you, you act weird. What’s changed?” he asked, pushing his fingers through her dark hair as upstairs, Lula turned the bathroom upside down.
Dakota had become accustomed to her relationship with Jackson over the year. It made her feel more wanted than she ever had. Despite all the wrong she knew happened between them, she trusted him.
For this reason, she told him about her dreams. He laughed slightly and whispered, “You know, I probably would kill you if you tried to leave me, but I know you won’t so don’t worry, they are only dreams.” And his eyes became soft suddenly as she looked into them.
Lula bustled back into the kitchen and stood between them to apply the plaster to Dakota’s bleeding finger.
As she sat down to breakfast, Dakota realised that Jackson was telling the truth. He probably would kill her if she tried to leave, but she knew she never would, even though something about him disturbed her.
After that day, she felt her feelings for him change. She knew that she was in love with Jackso
n. She welcomed him into her bed and cherished how he made her feel – like a woman, not a thirteen-year-old school girl. She belonged to him.
The dreams continued to wake her up, long after Jackson had sloped off to her sister’s bed, and after a time, the thought of dying in his big hands became strangely erotic. Her deep fear of him became an aphrodisiac and her fantasies took a dark turn. Their lovemaking often incorporated the threat of him killing her, and she discovered things about herself, she found hard to even tell her diary. What she and Jackson got up to late at night was becoming something she felt she could never discuss with anyone, even if it had been acceptable for her to be with him at all. Everything about their relationship was dangerous, and it was this, she told her diary, which kept her wanting more.
It no longer crossed her mind that she was betraying her sister, or that she was too young to be having an active sex life with a twenty-eight-year-old man. She slogged her way through her normal life of school and homework. She ignored every bitchy comment thrown her way by school bullies, acting innocent when her school colleagues talked about their own sex lives, and looked forward to her late-night meeting with her lover.
She was living a double life, and one life made it possible for her to cope with the other.
FIFTEEN: Another Secret
Dakota sat back in her chair as the wind howled fiercely at the library windows. She put her head in her hands and felt that at last she might understand what had happened to her. Recalling the nightmares she had had about Jackson murdering her had put forth images she had not long ago seen with her own dead eyes. The dream where she was murdered in the woods had been in exactly the place she had seen her own dead body when she had returned to her death scene. It was beginning to look like she had been having premonitions of her own death back when she was thirteen years old. She had somehow known that one night deep in the future, she would die in a rain soaked forest at the hands of the man who had taken advantage of her for years.
Purgatory Hotel Page 10
