House of Monks
by Darren Speegle

When the knock came at the door, Rob’s first thought was that it was Dave come to apologize or to gloat—if there was any difference. His second thought was that it was his publisher with news that a relative had shown up unexpectedly and she couldn’t rent him the house after all. Finally, he imagined a gleefully cruel public official reporting that the rules had changed and Rob was being kicked out of the country two months early.

He was totally unprepared for the short, well-dressed man who stood there announcing himself as a Monsieur Gibeault from “The Institution.” The man spoke English, which indicated he knew in advance that Rob was a foreigner. Rob, however, had no idea what institution the man was talking about. This seemed to surprise the fellow immensely. Hadn’t Marie told him that the property bordered a facility for the insane? The large building visible from the main road as you drove west? Rob told him he’d only driven that way once and he had assumed that the place was a monastery. It used to be, the man said, decades ago. Then he scratched his forehead and confessed that this was indeed awkward, for someone had escaped the Institution in the pre-dawn hours and was doubtless still roaming the surrounding hills. The escapee was not one of the violents, so no need to worry on that count. But if Rob happened to see or hear anything, please call. He gave Rob his card and left.

Rob considered phoning his publisher/lessor under some work-related pretense, but what difference did it make? If Marie had informed him what the property bordered, he would have been all the more eager to move in. For a person who made their meager living as an artist, there was much to be said for mystique as well as setting. When it came to the former, an asylum certainly qualified.

It was early, and the odor of fresh coffee filled the house. He poured himself a cup and went out back to sit on the tile terrace while he sipped. Behind him the lumbering two-story dwelling still hid the sun, and the acre or so of backyard glistened with April condensation. To the right the yard gave over to rolling pasture, while the opposite side pulled up at the edge of a patch of woods that Rob knew to extend to the main road. The rear of the yard, ending in a thicket of vines and underbrush, presented the question mark. The fellow had pointed in that direction when he spoke of where one property bordered the other.

Rob lit a cigarette, one of the freedoms he could enjoy here at his own place. Dave had made him go outside to smoke and then bitched about the smell on his clothes so much that Rob had eventually parted with tobacco. He wondered if Dave knew about the Institution, if the withholding of that information was part of some game. He wondered if the two of them, Dave and Marie, laughed about it as they kissed and fondled one another. Why had they done him any favors, anyway? Dave had to know he wouldn’t bother to apply for residency status, that if he was forced to pay taxes to the French government, he wouldn’t have enough money left from his scanty earnings to cover the rent and utilities. Sure, they wouldn’t inform the powers that be as long as it amused them, but what then?

He didn’t know what then, but he knew what he was going to do now. He put out his cigarette and walked across the expanse of yard in his slippers. The foliage writhed as he approached, inviting him into its densities. When he reached the yard’s end, he realized he wouldn’t be able to ginger his way through the tangle of thorns and ticks. He knew the shed contained several pieces of yard equipment in addition to the lawnmower that he’d been invited to use. He opted on the chainsaw, grabbing the can of gas and a pair of gloves as well. As he looked at the wall of vegetation before him, it was no more daunting than the next writing project. Starting up the saw, he felt a certain power over his dominion.

As he began to cut, releasing the scents of spring resins into the air, the sun spilled over the roof.

* * *

More visible from the open backyard than it was from the road, the facility looked the part of the house of monks…with certain accents. It rested on higher ground some distance back from a stone wall fortified with nasty coils of barbed wire. Barred windows lined the bleak, crumbling walls of the massive building, looking over a stretch of green that sloped down to the desolate bulwark enclosing the grounds. Bodies dressed in identical garments moved about on the morning grass as in a shared dream. They were scarcely more than apparitions from this distance, but Rob had binoculars, which he fetched when the initial fascination wore off.

He observed their feet first, having noticed how the material of their footwear caught slivers of sunlight. Their slippers almost matched his own, except his were now torn and punctured and stained. Next, he let his glasses roam over their gowns, which whispered like yesterday as they walked. Beneath the articles, they appeared to wear nothing, lending an added, natural grace to their waltz. The faces themselves were all that remained to be viewed, but he wouldn’t let himself look there. That much privacy must be preserved. To intrude upon the secret masks of lunatics and neighbors, from afar, like this, would be a crime. While he was clearing the thicket with the chainsaw, they had occasionally looked his way, but without any real interest, that he could tell. While he could not reciprocate such indifference, he could have some respect. Some decency, Marie. A shred of courtesy, Dave.

The quietude surrounding the patients, the facility and its grounds, disturbed him in wonderful ways. He found a pad and pen, planted himself in his chair on the terrace, where he could now easily take in the neighboring estate, and began to write. His muse fawned over him, unperturbed by his departure from the ritual. Butterflies that had materialized out of the April dew flittered in soundless inspiration as lunchtime came and went unnoticed, and the words spun like silk.

Dave would have enjoyed witnessing this creative burst, peeking over his shoulder and watching the tapestry form. Dave had always admired Rob the writer. Rob’s art filled a hole in him. It was why he had invited his old college buddy over from the States, a perfect charitable diversion from Brussels and international law, the path he had chosen. He wasn’t, perhaps, inventive enough to have thought of it unassisted; but that’s where Marie entered, a publisher friend who just might be willing to look at some of Rob’s work for the Belgian and French markets. Call it a grant. Call it a favor. Call it a lie.

Rob wrote until his hand and eyes hurt, until his hunger broke through the trance. By then twilight had arrived, freezing the landscape in outlines. The monastic Institution sat on its crest, solitudinous, unknown against the darkening sky. Rob wondered when the last of the monks had wandered in out of the waning day. He couldn’t be sure about the external world. Coming out into it was like waking from a dream.

Soup warmed him. A dollop of bourbon warmed him again. Night fell around the old stucco house they had provided for him. He wondered what words he had written, what landscapes he had visited while in the gulf. He thought to look, to sit with the bloated pad under the moonlight, cloaked in the crisp spring evening. But he dismissed the urge as an echo, which left him only the cigarettes and the bourbon…threat of senseless TV, books, thought. He reclined on the couch, let the clock count. He wanted to get up and turn on a light, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The smoke was Belgian lace in the dark. The noises were the years in the house’s bones.

A knock woke him. First he thought of Dave, coming to apologize and gloat for bringing him over here to pursue his art, only then to dump him in rural nowhere. His next thought…but no, she wouldn’t be prowling the countryside after sundown. It could only be the gleefully cruel public official, in the gown of a lunatic.

He flipped on the porch light, looking through the middle panel, hoping the visitor didn’t die in the effulgence. The gown glowed, but flesh occurred beneath. The eyes were a familiar blue, dominating the clean lines and shape of the face. He opened the door, and the gown stirred, drifted idly on the current. The eyes in the face shifted uncertainly. That part wasn’t right. But then the muse never demanded things be just so.

The visitor, male, early-thirties, opened his mouth to speak, but Rob stopped him. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I don’t know French.”

“Yes,” said the other, clearly at the limit of his English with that and his next utterance: “I…I am…lost.”

“Come in,” Rob said. “I know about the cold. The isolation. All of it.”

“Oui, merci,” said the guest as he entered.

Rob led him through the front hall to the living room. The man’s eyes moved around the whole time, exploring the gloom, the edges of furniture emerging out of shadows. Rob turned on the light, and the brilliance blinded them both. Concealing his whimper, the guest took the seat offered. Rob asked him his name.

“Francois.”

Rob fetched the bottle of bourbon, holding it up for approval. Oui was that approval, even timidly uttered. The appearance of the elixir didn’t cause the guest to blossom into more than what he was, nor would Rob have expected such. What magic might be gleaned resided in the drink itself, sipped slowly. Rob offered his guest a cigarette, but Francois wrinkled his nose slightly at the sight.

“Excuse me,” Rob said, and rose and went to the bathroom. The cigarette dangled there in the glass, irritating him. He extinguished it in the basin, trying not to think about things. Trying not to think about that last evening with Dave. But the mirror was right there, the cabinet was right there. Dave was right there. How could he not save what truth lay scattered among the remnants?

He took his time, making sure everything was right this time, that he didn’t fuck up like he had before. He rubbed his shaded lips together, he bathed in the scent of himself, he went out and faced the revelation.

Francois had not moved, though his drink was empty and his eyes were twin burning sapphires. Yes, Rob knew those eyes very well. They watched him put in a CD, another sign, another signal.

“You know,” he said, hovering by the player. “Coming to a foreign country to pursue a career in writing—it’s ludicrous. Coming to a foreign country to be with a special someone from college, that’s another matter entirely. You’re brought into his home for six plus months, held just beyond the graze of the fingertips, then cast aside when it is no longer convenient. Now that you are doing so, quote, well, you can afford to move into your own place. Marie has a perfect place in the country she’s been thinking about leasing. Oh and shhhhh!, we’d better not say anything, but the place borders a,” —his voice fell to a whisper— “facility for the insane.”

As he approached his guest, he could see his soul in the orbs of the other’s eyes. The visitor sat as if transfixed, but of course that was part of the game he played. Even the understanding, the seeming to grasp what was happening, was false. Dave had proven himself to be no associate of truth. The small cosmetic implement in Rob’s hand could not have been more truthful in its delivery. Rob cried out as he drove it home. He cried out to be taken home. He cried out for silence. The silence of that moment before the phone rang and Dave’s voice greeted him from faraway Brussels. A silence he had almost forced himself to be comfortable with.

The monk’s body arched in the chair, blood emerging as he clutched at his thin robe, pulling and tearing the material from the spot where the instrument had pierced him. In his agony, the fabric ripped down the length of his torso, separating to reveal his limp, shrunken organ, white thighs, shaking knees. Then he settled back into the upholstery and sat there, with eyes on the deliverer. Blue, forever familiar eyes.

In the bathroom the blood washed off easily enough, disappearing down the drain, but Rob could not scrub his hands to the sharp reflective clean of the basin no matter how hard he tried. Eventually he realized the lie was in the porcelain, and he was able to sleep with only the mildest disturbances.

* * *

In the morning, another dewy April morning, he sat with his coffee on the terrace. He read from the pad with all its wild, impassioned scribbles, and the muse took him into her bosom, his trance. Before he realized it the hour had come and gone, and out on the hems of his field of vision, in that green interim beyond the fortified wall, the monks were roaming around, looking for answers in their elegant interpretation of some mysterious opus.

He felt comfortable enough now, after his restful sleep, to take the next step. But he let the binoculars lie in his lap for a long time before bringing them up to view the aspects that floated across the grounds. At first he thought they had none, that their solitude had deprived them of their identities, but then it began to materialize, the same face for every one of them—like their gowns, their slippers.

As the familiar eyes of that familiar countenance looked back at him mockingly, he tapped the implement against the rim of his mug. When the coffee was finished, he went to the shed to peruse the tools. As he glanced through the building’s small window at the barbed wire that stood between him and the monks, the selection seemed sufficient for the task at hand.