You may be wondering why I, and the others, paid so much money to come here, or why we were prepared to sell access to ourselves. Well, that’s the reason. But, still, when Irene placed her hands on my shoulders and told me she would make me rich, my stomach flipped with queasiness. What had I signed up for? Would it be worth it? How much of myself was I prepared to bare?
*
I wrapped up the uneaten cheese and put it back in the fridge. When the fridge door creaked shut, the sound reminded me of a movie monster waking from a deep slumber. It interrupted the stillness of the place, and I almost wanted to apologise to the building for my intrusion.
Back in the kitchen, I flicked off the light switch and shuddered in the dark, its shroud sudden and unnerving. What else could I expect from an old, supposedly cursed monastery? Then I wondered whether there were cameras in this room, watching me.
The Event had not started, and yet I already sensed onlookers out there. There’d been times between my house in Derbyshire and the airport that I’d considered asking the taxi driver to take me home. Four weeks of being watched by viewers. My every move monitored and critiqued. It made my skin crawl. So far I’d avoided as much scrutiny as possible, and now I was challenging myself to bask in it.
Irene had told me that my room was the sixth door on the left if I followed the cloister walkway, keeping the cherry tree on my right. My room was the farthest from the kitchen, closer to the old church at the back of the monastery. As I made that journey, my suitcase rolled noisily along, sandpaper on stone, a skateboard wheeling down the tarmac. I cringed with each step, body hunched over, balanced on tiptoes as though that would make any difference to the plastic wheels on the flagstones.
Rather than switch on the lights, I decided to use the light from my phone. Do not let it frighten you, Alexandru had said. I’d been game for the story while I was safe in the back of a taxi; but now I was walking where other feet had tread two hundred years ago, tingles spread up and down my arms and the back of my neck. I tried my best to ignore them. I peeked beneath the arches along the walkway, catching glimpses of the tree, and the old, untouched part of the building beyond.
Oh, it had been such a good idea at the time to encourage Alexandru’s retelling of the myths about this building. After all, it was no lie to say I didn’t believe in ghosts, because I don’t. However, shadows in the corners, a bouncing mobile-torch illuminating a mere patch of corridor at a time, and my heart dancing around in my chest, resulted in possibly the most terrifying few minutes of my life up to that point.
Women had died in this place. For all I knew, I was walking where their blood had spilled, where their limbs had lifelessly trailed. Had it been international news? Had it been eclipsed by the rise of communism? Many names had been lost to history, including those of these nuns.
I counted the doors on the left and finally came to the sixth, opening it quietly, afraid I’d take the wrong one and wake another participant with a fright. My breath caught as I reached for a light switch. Eventually, after scraping my fingers against the bricks, I used my phone again and found the cord, illuminating more white walls and furniture. The sudden light made the place too sterile and modern, despite the lancet arches above the stained-glass windows. I closed the door behind me and dragged the suitcase into the centre of the room.
Tiredness hit me then, as well as a wave of unexpected homesickness; after all, coming here had also been a way to escape what I left behind. It soon faded. This room, the history of the place, the people I had yet to meet, and the strangeness of Irene’s celestial presence, felt almost laughably bizarre. But despite the exhaustion creeping into every bone in my body, I rotated slowly, taking in every stone, every iron joint in the old window, every spot of coving, every cobweb, every panel of glass, every carved arch, every beam, and imagined the people who had lived here. I breathed in the air, scented with old must and new dust, and with that, there was nothing but the complete privilege of being in that place at that time.
Then I collapsed in the large, modern bed, and slept like the dead.
Chapter Three
The dawn danced on my walls in irregular shapes of reflected emerald and scarlet. I sat up and listened. The monastery was as noiseless as it had been in the middle of the night. Not wanting to wake anyone, I moved quietly around my room, hanging my clothes in the wardrobe, folding knickers for the drawers, and placing toiletries around the sink in the small en-suite bathroom. Then I picked up the cardboard pill boxes from the bottom of my suitcase and stared at them.
Two packets for four weeks. At home, I’d leave them in the kitchen next to the glasses, and then every morning I’d get a glass, fill it, and take my pill. But I couldn’t do that at the monastery, not in front of people I didn’t know. During the application process I’d mentioned my mental illness to Irene, and she’d told me it was perfectly fine. But now that I was here, surrounded by strangers, in a place where legend says the dead walk… I wasn’t at ease.
I swallowed one of my pills dry, and then I showered, dressed, and left my room. Part of me wanted to explore the building in the morning light, but I wasn’t sure of the scope of the place, or whether I’d lose myself meandering through the passages. Instead, I slipped out of the same door I arrived through the night before, using the key Irene had left in a drawer in a small cabinet placed in the entry way next to the coats, and decided to stroll a lap around the place. It’d been dark last night, but I’d still had the sense that our rooms took up less than half of the building.
Up above the mountain, sunlight gilded every wall, while in the distance rolled a carpet of autumn leaves from the forest below. Tears formed at the corners of my eyes, from the biting wind, and the beauty before me. Humbled by it, I took my time to orbit the monastery, taking in every old stone and arched window.
It was mostly square, with the refectory poking out at a right angle on the south wing. The tall church loomed over the north. From it sprouted the tower with an empty belfry beneath its steeple. Next to the tower was the great, metallic aerial build for our retreat. It was a jarring contrast to the former ruin and a scar against the natural beauty. All along the renovated west wing of the monastery were sloping roofs, and on top of the shingles sat the solar panels, blinking and glimmering in the crisp morning. They were a blight on the monastery to me, but I supposed that was the price we paid for electricity. I walked along the wall of the church for a while, imagining the nuns filtering out through the great doors. Would they be chatty? Or serious? Chatty, I decided. Gossiping about the priest’s delivery of the sermon, his lisp, one of the older sisters taking a nap in the back pew.
The way the nuns had died was sudden and violent. It was understandable that the locals would have started a legend to make sense of it all. A place so isolated from the world could be easily infiltrated by a stranger with a malign motive. A person obsessed with violence and terror.
But more than that, the place had an atmosphere to it, unlike anywhere I’d been before. Perhaps it was the way you could walk around one corner and sense a still quiet like none other, and yet around the next, the forest was alive before you, winds rolling down from the peaks, rustling through the trees. At times the walls shielded you from the weather, other times it thrust you into gusts of cool air.