Purgatory Hotel Read online

  “I don’t feel dead… I can breathe, I can move... nothing feels different, except… I don’t remember what I was like…”

  “I know, it all feels the same as life – just darker. The breathing thing is just a habit – you only do it when you think about it. Oh and the lack of a heartbeat.” He laughed and put his hand on his chest. She did the same and realised he was right – her heart was still. Not a whisper of life came from its dark, dead chambers, and her eyes welled with tears.

  “Oh god, is this hell? I know it’s not Heaven, so this must be hell.’

  “No, it’s not quite hell, it’s the place in-between. The place where they put you when they aren’t quite sure where you belong yet.”

  “Purgatory,” she whispered to herself as tears began to roll over her dry lips. She recalled images from a book, distorted faces, horror.

  “No point crying, love. You have to learn to accept it quick as you can, and get on with it,” he said softly so only she could hear. She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Crying won’t do you any good in here. It just makes people think you’re weak and you can be picked on. Don’t let anyone see you cry, you hear?”

  Dakota nodded obediently and glanced around to check no one had seen her moment of weakness.

  “Why are you here? I mean, how’d you get here?” she asked, a mild slur in her voice.

  “I was run over – got drunk and stepped out into the path of a lorry.”

  “Sorry… hang on... ” She put up her hand as her dead mind threw forth a piece of information. “Purgatory. I thought you only came here if you had been bad or sinful or something?”

  “Well done, love,” Danny smiled in recognition of her memory twitch. “Yeah, that’s right. You come to Purgatory to atone for your sins. There isn’t a person here who didn’t do something bad in their life. Guess it’s a bit like prison, only everyone here is actually guilty.” He laughed and lit a cigarette for himself.

  “What, you mean sins like lying or stealing or coveting oxen?”

  “Oh no, you only come here for the big ones. The rest is forgivable as far as the almighty is concerned. But I guess they feel that some things... well… need to be paid for.” His voice changed tone and Dakota felt cold suddenly.

  She was here to pay for something she had done wrong.

  “Shit, what did I do?” she muttered feeling her head start to throb again.

  “Well I’m sure it’ll come back to you, and when it does... you’ll wish it hadn’t.” He paused and took a drag on his cigarette as lightning lit the edges of the curtains and thunder followed hard upon its heels. “You see, that’s part of your punishment. Remembering what you did, understanding how it affected everybody else, feeling their pain, too... feeling the guilt and how it eats away at you.”

  The rain began to sound like the sea, arriving at the window in waves, travelling on the gusts of wind. The Bar seemed quieter, most of its customers either gone or passed out. Dakota knew if she was sober she would be afraid, but right now, she was numb with drink and tiredness. Her wandering eyes fell on the motionless body of the man on the floor. Since sliding off his stool earlier he had not moved.

  “Where are you from?” she asked as she took a cigarette from Danny’s cigarette packet.

  Danny smiled at her and lit the cigarette she put to her cold lips, and for a moment watched her rake strings of her brown hair from her face behind a veil of smoke.

  “Ireland,” he answered, stubbing out a butt in the ashtray.

  Dakota froze. The room around her began to spin as a wind rushed through the corridors of her dead brain and one of the many locked doors of her memory burst open and poured its contents out into her still veins.

  “Oh my god, I remember...” she managed as her head grew heavy with a torrent of lost images and faces.

  Her first memory was sitting at a dining table. She was four years old and eating breakfast with her sister and her parents. She stared into a perfect pile of porridge oats that was waiting for the hot milk her dad was making and without any word she blew the oats from the bowl and watched as they settled on the table cloth.

  Then she was lying down awake beside her sleeping mother as the summer sun poured into their lounge; the TV was playing cartoons.

  “Come on, darling, brush your teeth. It’s past your bed-time,” said her mother in a strong Irish accent, as she walked her up a darkened staircase.

  Dakota Grace Crow was the youngest child of Hannah and Jack Crow, two Irish immigrants to a small village called Little Mort, in the south of England. Dakota had one sister, Lula, who was ten years older than her. There had been other babies after Lula but none had lived beyond a week – some miscarried late, some were stillborn, others died of cot-death. Lula had found the two that lived for a short while, cold and still in their beds, moonlight spilling in onto their closed innocent eyes. As a result of her experiences with dead babies, Lula ended up under the care of a psychiatrist; Dakota would lie awake at night and listen to her sister’s sobs coming from the bed next to hers. Often times, Dakota would wake to find her sister standing over her bed shaking her awake, crying desperately then relaxing into a huge hug when her baby sister finally woke up and looked back into the stormy green eyes they shared.

  It seemed that Lula never recovered from finding two of her siblings cold and dead in their innocent baby cotton wool sleep, and when Dakota was born she would creep in to check on her all hours of the night, terrified she was not doing her job as big sister properly. When Dakota got older, Lula would tell her all the time about how she used to come in to watch her sleeping.

  Dakota could see her sister clear as day – when she was fifteen years old, with eyes the colour of a storm-tossed sea and a swathe of dark brown hair that fell down to her shoulder blades. She read poetry, Mills and Boon books, listened to opera and cried a lot.

  Dakota remembered the perfume her sister wore: Dewberry, and whenever Lula hugged her, she would bury her face in Lula’s thick dark curly hair and breathe in the sweet smell. She remembered that Lula was beautiful in a buxom 1950s way, all pale skin and eyeliner.

  She remembered that she had often hoped she would be as beautiful as her sister one day. Then she realised she was unsure of how she looked now, having not seen a mirror since she woke up dead.

  Hannah Mary Crow had brown hair in a bob and green eyes that sparkled whenever she looked upon her children. Sometimes Dakota noticed a sad lost look in her eyes, and she knew that her mother was thinking about all the little babies she had given back to Heaven. All the big sisters and brothers Dakota should have had, lost to the earth under neat and tiny headstones.

  Hannah nearly always wore an apron, and her hands were often covered in flour. She always seemed to be baking cakes and scones. Dakota remembered the smell of her mother’s Tweed perfume mixed with the smell of flour and icing sugar when she cuddled her.

  Jack Crow was a loving but distant father and Dakota’s memories of him were scant but clear: he was building a swing in the back garden for her, his thick dark brown hair falling into his eyes; he was passing her a sausage roll as they picnicked on a stony beach somewhere in Ireland; he was closing the bedroom door and whispering goodnight to her and her sister.

  Then she was playing on a sandy beach in the sunshine, her sister trying desperately to get a suntan, laid out like a pale corpse in the sea of sand.

  Then it was raining as her mother ran out into the back garden to try and get the washing in before it was soaked through, Dakota scurrying after her, collecting the clothes pegs.

  Her father was reading to her from a Hans Christian Anderson book that had been his as a child, streetlight seeping in through a crack in the beige curtains.

  She was eight years old, and had won an award at school for best picture in a drawing competition.

  She remembered walking out in the fields that surrounded their village, corn shifting gently in the breeze of a summer evening, the sunlight painting the landscape gold.

/>   Her sister came home late at night wearing too much make up and a mini-skirt that left nothing to the imagination. As Dakota lay pretending to be asleep, her father put Lula into bed, a smell of alcohol and vomit filling the room; she listened to her sister’s weak drunken moans. It was Dakota’s ninth birthday.

  Then something bad happened.

  It was late on a Saturday night. Lula was eating popcorn and Dakota was half-asleep on the sofa beside her. Rain spattered the windows of the darkened room as the horror movie Lula was watching came to violent end. The clock struck midnight and Dakota awoke properly, turned smiling to her sister and cuddled her as the phone began to ring.

  Then, moments later, a hysterical Lula dropped the answered telephone, and Dakota ran to her and begged her to tell what was going on.

  “Oh god D, they’re dead! Mum and Dad! We need to get to the hospital!” managed Lula between sobs. Dakota hung up the phone and called a number; it was Lula’s boyfriend; he could drive them to the hospital. Somehow Dakota was taking care of her twenty-one-year-old hysterical sister, comforting her, wiping away her own tears and helping her into her boyfriend’s car.

  Then at the hospital, Dakota listened to her sister’s screaming tears as she identified their dead parents. They had gone to a wedding reception. Hannah had worn a blue silk dress. There was a car accident; they were dead on impact. Dakota was an orphan. It was her eleventh birthday.

  Dakota sobbed into her hands, uncontrollable tears streaking her face as she shook, her body suddenly wracked with pain and sorrow. The horror of losing her parents at such a young age washed over her, all the sadness and fear at once rushing through her as though it were the very blood that once coursed through her dead veins.

  Danny was beside her trying to comfort her, but every time she heard the lilting tones of his Cork accent, the one he shared with her parents, she felt a fresh wave of grief drowning her senses.

  No one else in the Bar even looked at her for more than a minute. They had seen it all before, the moment when something from the other side creeps back into the afterlife, some long gone memory that shatters the confused and lost souls trapped in the walls of the decrepit hotel. They also knew that before long, her tears would become more frequent for a while before drying up to revisit briefly from time to time – just occasionally, when the demons of the past reared up and brought up some horrific memory, dragging the poor souls into guilt or grief. People often just broke into tears without warning, because all they had now was memories and the secrets that came with them. Everybody here had something to feel guilty about, and every one of them deserved to stay awake for days on end, with bloodshot eyes and hollow hearts, wishing for deliverance, hoping for forgiveness and the presence of God.

  She was no different, and no amount of comforting would help her.

  But Danny could not help but try to calm her. When the hysterics subsided and all that was left was calm and red eyes, he passed her a bottle of vodka and replenished her cigarette stash.

  “I can’t believe I remember something! Well I can remember loads actually, up until I was eleven, all the happy childhood years…” Dakota trailed off and wondered if she could even be bothered to drink anymore, but in the same instant knew the numbness of alcohol would be good.

  “Can you remember anything after the night your parents died?”

  “Yeah, not much. I know that we kept the house and Lula’s boyfriend came to live with us. I can’t remember him, though – just that he was there. The funeral is sketchy… it rained and Lula had plaited my hair… she said it was just us now, that she’d be my mum from that day on… she seemed odd though, sedated. I think she was on a much higher dosage of medication by then. They put her on anti-depressants when she was about sixteen, I think, when she first went into therapy… had been on them ever since...” Dakota stared at her burning cigarette. Maybe it would have been better if she had never remembered anything of her life. She began to think she did not want to know how she died or why she was here in the first place.

  “I remember Lula telling me that I’d see my parents again one day when we met in Heaven.” Dakota choked on tears that made her throat swell. “I’ll never see them again, will I? They aren’t here; I’d know by now, wouldn’t I? Why would they be here anyway? They were good people… loving… wouldn’t have done anything that would have sent them here.”

  “So, you obviously didn’t die when you were eleven. How old were you when you died?” asked Danny, changing the subject and sitting down again.

  “Twenty-one,” she said as her mind offered more information, a tease of what else was hidden from her. “I’m twenty… -one. I remember it was 2004. I was born in 1983.”

  “Right, so that’s a whole ten years after your parents died… So why can’t you remember? I mean, why would you only remember up to that point?” She could tell Danny was trying to help her, but he also seemed to want to be somewhere else, as though the whole thing was stressing him out as much as her. He was shaking slightly as he lit another cigarette, and he ran his old fingers exasperatedly over his lined and tired face.

  “I don’t know… I think I need time to just deal with what I remember so far. You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m grand. Just feel a bit bad is all… that my accent brought all that back.”

  “Well at least I can remember something now. I guess I have plenty of time to remember the rest.” She paused as her mind floated off. “I wonder what my funeral was like...”

  “Won’t have happened yet; time moves very differently here. It’s something like a month passes here for every day on earth. Still it’s hard to keep track of time here, being as we don’t have any days.”

  “What did you do, Danny?” she slurred, gulping down another drink.

  “It’s getting late; you should go and settle into your room. I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, in the morning,” she muttered, standing up and stubbing out her cigarette.

  “No love, we don’t have those,” he said, moving away.

  “What?”

  “Mornings... just night, always night here. That’s part of the punishment, too. No sun, no blue skies.” He gave her one last pitying smile and turned away to tidy up the Bar. As Dakota stumbled through the collapsed customers and tables, she began to understand why everyone had that pitying gaze when they looked at her. She felt as though there was so much she didn’t know about this place, and she suspected none of it was good.

  THREE: The Rapist and The Widow

  Glancing down the corridor towards the lobby, Dakota could see that people were still milling around, but the laughing man had gone quiet. Facing her were the big shiny doors of the elevator. She only had to wait a moment before they opened and out wandered a man, looking sad and dejected. When he looked up at Dakota she could tell he registered her as a new face, but he did not offer any greeting. He just brushed past her in his dirty clothes and headed for the Bar.

  She felt hazy. She had drunk too much for her to actually feel good, but she knew she had felt worse before drinking the bottle of vodka. As the doors shut she remembered what Ariel had told her to do, and looking down at the key in her hand, she called out her room number. A sharp jolt knocked her to the floor as the carriage rocketed up at an alarming speed, motion sickness washed over her and she feared she would vomit on the faded brown carpet. Then as soon as she began to acclimatize, another sharp jolt that nearly sent her into the fluorescent light above her signalled the end of her ride. The doors slid aside and she crawled out into the corridor.

  She paused there on all fours for a moment, breathing deeply.

  “Get inside.”

  Dakota looked up and found the corridor empty. It stretched into inky blackness to her left and her right, dull wall lamps lighting part of the way, but she could not see any further than a few feet either way. The voice she had heard whispering had no owner that she could see, but she had the feeling someone was watching her.

  “Hurry!
Get inside!” repeated the voice. This time, Dakota tracked the sound to a door bearing the number twenty-one which lay a foot or so from her.

  “Hello?”

  “Please, just get into your room!” reiterated the frantic woman who was obviously behind door twenty-one. Dakota was about to approach the door, when from the corner of her eye she saw movement to her right. She sat back on her heels and looked down the hall. A few doors down from where she sat the wall lights had stopped working and the blackness was absolute, but she could feel something was there, waiting beyond the curtain of dark, watching. Lights flickered.

  The moment she stood, the darkness cackled at her.

  Fear lunged in her belly as a figure began advancing towards her.

  Panic took over as she lunged towards door twenty and, shaking, thrust the key into the lock, seconds lasting too long as the lolloping figure lurched towards her, laughing and dragging its feet. It was the same chilling laugh she had heard in the lobby earlier. The same man was now slouching towards her, and her mind raced with all the things he might want to subject her to. As soon as she opened the door she slammed it shut after her, feeling blindly for locks and bolts which she was relieved to find.