Benedict and Dominic had just entered a spinney of wiry juniper when they noticed the air was tinged with its rich scent. The land around them was unkempt and ragged, giving no encouragement to cultivation. Patches of dry woodland sprouted out of hard earth, old irregular stones, and jagged outcrops of slate. At least the knotted trees gave some shelter from the swathes of rain and the parching sun. The way back, so far, was without incident. They had not stopped to sleep properly, only dozing in the sun and napping under the shelter of trees.
They were nearing the far edge of the wood when they saw the rude shelter in the trees. Benedict approached cautiously, his staff held out before him. The hut was a simple but sturdy thing, probably erected by foresters or shepherds. Long slabs of bark were lain up against a frame of roped branches, some still with leaves and galls. It was more a wooden tent than a house. The old man poked his staff into its entrance and rattled it back and forth. Nothing ran out. Only the echo and the falling leaves, dead twigs, and fungus responded to the movement. Dominic questioned him with a sideways look.
“Foxes, vermin,” Benedict said, his first words since his fury on the road.
“We will stay the night here.” His words were ruffled by tiredness, his maimed lip over-sipping the cold air.
They allowed themselves a small fire near the hut. As they departed the great home of the painting, Benedict had poached some food from the overstocked kitchen. He unwrapped his spoils in silence as the night grew thick in the trees and the brightness of the stars burned away any remnants of lingering clouds. After a poor meal, they crawled into the tight space and curled up like children. The woods were all eyes and ears around them. In these sparsely populated lands, the reality of the monsters in the paintings seemed more possible.
Both monks unsheathed their knives and crucifixes before falling asleep.
In the darkest hour before dawn, a noise hooked Dominic out of his sleep. He lay rigid, listening, trying to identify it. It sounded like chattering, like chattering human teeth, and it was growing louder. His heart froze, and he shivered under his blanket. He did not want to see what was making such a ghastly noise, but knew he must. He stretched out a hand in the dark to raise Benedict, but the man’s body felt cold and stiff. A sliver of moonlight illuminated the monk’s snarling lip and transformed it into the death grin of risus sardonicus. Dominic threw himself outside and fell to the ground, where he lay panting madly until the chattering dragged his attention to the trees.
High in the branches, strewn and woven throughout the leaves, were the people from The Nassau Depiction. The painted naked men and woman who awaited or adored torture. Their obscene paleness gloated inside their thin, elegant bodies. Their hollow eyes watching him; their jaws chattering. Their faces were all alike, as though they belonged to one family without age or gender—except the one who was climbing down the tree, headfirst. The one Dominic knew. It was the naked man he had seen on his visit to the Gland of Mercy. Dominic had not recognized the man then, but he did now, even though his features had been smeared into the likeness of all the others. He had reached the base of the tree and was now walking like a dog on all fours straight toward the young monk.
Dominic’s screaming sounded like that of a burning skylark. Friar Benedict shot straight up in a moment of alertness, banging his head against the side of the hut and bringing a shower of beetles and tree crust onto his blinking face. He gathered himself and crawled out of the shelter.
“What’s a matter with you, boy! Control yourself!”
Dominic’s eyes were like saucers gleaming in the moonlight. “You’re dead!” he croaked.
“Not yet,” Benedict said, confronting his companion. “Pull yourself together, you have been dreaming.”
The words seem to slap the young man back to wakefulness. They both sat on the stony ground and stared at the reality of the hovel. Dominic was reassured by the old man’s bad temper.
“Oh God! But it was so real.”
“You have been sleepwalking.”
Benedict pushed past the boy and looked up into the trees where the boy had been pointing. Nobody was draped in them, and the soft sounds of the night were without the faintest curse of chatter. Nothing moved, not even the wind.
“It was exactly like the painting. The victims in the painting were here.”
“No, they weren’t!” said Benedict emphatically, while rubbing his eyes, stretching his taut mouth, and rearranging his disobedient lip. “It was a dream, only a dream.”
“I never dreamed such things before; now they’re here with me. How will I get them out?”
The old man returned to his blanket and sat down in the impression that he had formed in the earth. He took a long breath, one that reached down into his compassion.
“Dominic, my son, you have seen a great work of another man’s imagination. A vivid, overpowering picture that has imprinted itself on you. There is no place inside you for such a thing to live. So it hides during the day and escapes in your dreams.”
The quietness of the night sat between them for a while.
“Will I always carry the stain of what I saw?”
“It will fade. Work and prayer will wash it away.”
“How do you know, Master?”
Dawn began to envelop the stars, and the moon was low.
“I know because I have had the same dream every night of my life. But time and study have dimmed it until now it is weaker than that light out there.”
“What was it, Master? Was it a picture?”
“No, my son, it was a scent. Overpowering and detached from any reason or common sense, it was a scent of honey and ammonia, fused in an almost-noxious haze. There was never a trace of it during the day, only at night. After I had slept an hour or more, it came to me. It has haunted me for years; that terrible perfume seemed to fluctuate between salvation and oblivion.”
“Did it ever escape from you, enter the world, and become actual?”
“Never.”
“So I will not bring those naked terrors back into our world? They will not escape like the painted creatures, and occupy, haunt, the monastery?”
“No, they will remain bound inside you until they or you fade.”
“But what about the abbot?”
“We don’t have to tell the abbot about any of this.”
“He already knows.”
Benedict was confused and annoyed.
“He was there, Master. He was here with the other naked people.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He was in the trees, like he was with the dead in the Gland. Naked by himself, but in there with them all.”
Benedict’s eyes had changed. His displeasure was a blunt tool to use now.
“Are you saying you saw the Gland here, just now in your dream?”
“No, Master, I have only ever seen it the once. All those years ago, when I first came to the abbey and Brother Cecil took me there.”
There was a curdling of silence while Benedict slowly explained to himself what he thought he had just heard.
“You are telling me in all truth that you saw Clementine naked and alone in that terrible place?” Benedict was shaking his head.
“Cecil saw him, too, and told me to take no notice and come away.”
“Did he now?”
“Why was he there and in my dream tonight?”
Very quietly the old monk replied, “I think it best to save any further speculations until tomorrow”—he looked at the sky and heard the birds—“or, rather, later today.”
“But, Master, I have so many questions.”
“They will never be answered, especially by me. Our pilgrimage is over, and we return with more questions than we had before. That painting was a confusion of truths. We must now forget all about it and return to our life of prayer and obedience. I will not speak of this matter again.”
“How will I ever understand?”
“Through learning, study, and the day-to-day running of our community. But now we must rest; there will be plenty of time to talk on our way home.”
The “confusion of truths” had already begun to open a deep channel of thought in Benedict, but he was unable to share it until it had processed into a nonvolatile distillation. His companion was not ready for this kind of thinking. And now he had a deeper, more disturbing conundrum to add to his contemplations. Benedict did not want to run this abhorrent new image on the same track as the enlightenment he had just received from the Saint Anthony painting. At their best, they would be antithetical. At their worst? At their worst, they might join and threaten in all manner of unthinkable heresies. He had not brought Dominic all this way to be confronted by horror and confusion.
The old man had serious doubts about the youth’s capacity, both in his faith and in his ability to comprehend. The power of the painting had rooted fear and misgivings in his young heart, and they might grow stronger if he were subjected to more visitations of the abnormal. The only thing that balanced this terror was Dominic’s good health and his trust in his elders.
“Master,” Dominic said, taking the advice to change the subject. “Master, I keep thinking that perhaps I should make a journal of our mission. Write down the things we have seen, and the people and oddities that we have met.”
The old monk’s twisted lip began to snarl its way up over his teeth, preparing for a restrained bark.
“Such a manuscript might be of value,” Dominic continued, “to other novices who never had the advantage of a journey like this, nor the wisdom and scholarship of a master with such devotion.”
The snarl melted back to a quiet clearing of the old monk’s throat. The conversation was over, and the morning was growing bright enough to seal it forever. They dozed, exhausted, a thin warmth radiating through the trees. An hour or two later, they gathered their meager possessions and set foot again into a slightly altered world. Dominic found something reassuring about the old man’s moans and groans, his complaints about his bones and his age, and an hour later he found a subject to think about without pain.
“It will be Lent before we reach home,” the boy commented.
“Aye, and they will be making a greater dog’s dinner of it than normal,” said Benedict.
“Why so, Master?”
“Because I am not there to oversee it and get the novices to pull their weight.”
Unable to think of an appropriate response, and still wanting to ask questions that had been banned, Dominic blurted out something that he belatedly realized could be grossly misunderstood by the tetchy old monk.
“Is it not surprising that Abbot Clementine let you leave the monastery at all at this time?”
To his relief, Benedict seized the right end of the question with apparent appetite.
“That’s precisely what I have been thinking,” he said and, without a moment’s reflection, continued. “In fact, he seemed enthusiastic about my departure, and yours. I have been considering this for the last few days and now begin to suspect something untoward might be occurring.”
Their footsteps had been slowing, and now they came to a halt.
“What do you suspect, Master? Surely no matter what we know about the good abbot, he will always work with consideration for all his flock?”
“That’s possibly true, but Abbot Clementine also must obey commands from the Papal See, which contain edicts and instructions that we lowly brothers will never know.”
The abbot’s name had a new, sour resonance in the old friar’s mouth.
“But surely such a venerated brother as yourself would be consulted on all matters?”
“Venerated! You mean venerable! Old but not respected.”
And here Benedict shifted his jaw and teeth into their more customary alignment for an attack.
“Do not confuse the two, child! Clementine has continually blocked and ridiculed many of my academic pursuits and achievements. His interference has held back my research for countless numbers of years.”
Dominic was shocked to hear the vehemence of the old man’s outburst. They were near an outcrop of rounded boulders, and Benedict waved at them, indicating that he and Dominic should pause for a rest. After fidgeting from one stone to another, and brushing dust and leaves off his chosen seat, the old man settled and began talking again.
“I always thought his motivation for curtailing my studies was academic jealousy powered by his ambition to become a prince of the church. I now think it was sometimes completely different.”
He looked up at Dominic and gazed into his eyes, seeking a space of understanding that might not exist.
“Did you know that both of us were reading the same books and manuscripts in the library, and that when he found out I had a more in-depth understanding of the old languages, he began his censorship of my knowledge? I was banned from reading anything about the history of the Glandula Misericordia and its association with the Oracles who had lived in our abbey. I had to accept his authority in this matter, so I looked past those questions and sought their foundation in abstract reflections that lie deeper in the past. I studied the references that spoke of the suspension of physical death and the continuation of life. It was then I discovered that certain key books and scrolls were missing—and some were from the chained reference section of the library where books must never be taken away.”
“Who has the key?” asked Dominic, puzzled.
Benedict groaned and bit his lip at the shallowness of the boy’s prosaic response. “The abbot, I suppose, but nobody has tried to open them for centuries. Some of the locks are encrusted with rust.”
“How do you know that, Master?”
The old man examined his tied feet in their broken sandals.
“Because I was trying to open one myself, and the abbot caught me.” His voice dropped. “That’s when he banned me from reading anything in that section of the library.”
They stopped talking for long enough to let the voice of the wind pass between them and to cast their eyes on the distant patterns of fields and hillside. They could just make out the odd symmetry of Das Kagel, sheltering among the smudges of purple and gray that changed with the density and movement of the clouds. Flocks of shadows scurried in the foreground to keep up with the leisurely magnitude of their propagators above. While in the deep sky, longer, ghostlike tendrils moved under a higher and far more ethereal wind.
Dominic wanted to learn more about the secrets of the abbey, but he knew he had to approach the old monk with great stealth. A mistaken question could shut down Benedict for the rest of their journey.
“Master, I have been thinking that maybe we should go to the places where the artist of those pictures found those creatures. Go there on our way home…to the farmland where those fields and walls are. There might be traces of them and a possible new scent for us to follow.”
“Maybe find and sniff at the upturned kennel?” asked the old man sarcastically.
Dominic smiled, thinking he had seen approval.
“You are more confused than the truths in those paintings, because you see only the component parts of some fantastic story or parable. Perhaps those pictures are not about the stories that they say they tell. Not about monsters and men, the living and the dead. Perhaps they are about perception itself?”
Benedict guffawed when he turned to look at the boy and saw a face that was the embodiment of incomprehension.
“If you draw the everyday things of the life we know next to creatures and situations that are grotesquely different, the contrast will make a joke. But if you make that picture with great skill and care, giving each part of it the same authority, so that the sun that warms the tree also casts its shadow over the Woebegots and across, onto the wall you know and the pumpkin your father grew…then, then, you have created a conviction by the keenness of your eye and the talent and practice of your hand. If the whole picture works with the same brilliant audacity, then the conviction becomes an enigma. And that mystery ferments in our minds—not as a mummery or a puppet show—as a demand to test our perception of reality. Both in this world and after it, and maybe in others of which we have never dreamed.”