Chapter 7
“We’ve been here before…” Arthur says, slowly getting up to his feet.
“I know…but when?” I ask.
Arthur observes the monastery, bugging his eyes.
“I cannot remember,” he tells me.
I landscape the monastery, struggling to recollect our past.
“Something about that monastery scares me, and yet I feel that we have to explore it to understand a story that concerns us,” I say, and Arthur nods.
“Are you scared too?” I want to know.
“Uneasiness is perhaps a better description for what I feel,” he replies.
We’re silent for a while, and I sit on the sand, pensive. Then Arthur smiles a crazy smile and winks at me. This flash of unexpected playfulness uplifts the eeriness of the moment.
“Come on,” he tells me, offering me his hand and pulling me up.
“Come on,” I echo, “let’s go.”
The monastery seemed close to the beach, but the appearances were deceiving. The beach fades into a land where grass and sparse bushes alternate, followed by trees, twisted and dry. After a whole hour walking, we’re still not there. The distance appears to shorten, and yet the position of the monastery is like an asymptote we can only approach, but never attain.
Arthur and I stop, looking at each other with a questioning gaze.
“Arthur, what does this place mean to us?” I ask.
Arthur shakes his head, opening his arms and then dropping them to his side.
“No, we should not give up,” I insist.
I close my eyes and think, and some images start to reflux within me.
“We were looking for something, something very important to my family. We had come here to look for answers on how to find it. I remember that some other people were with us, but I cannot recollect who they were. Our clothes were so outdated…as if you and I belonged to a very distant past. Is this possible?” I wonder out loud.
“We just used a time machine, so I assume your memories are not impossible” Arthur replies, calm and logical as usual.
“The monastery was locked. We had to use a trick to enter it,” I remember.
“Which trick?” Arthur asks.
“Behind the monastery there was a graveyard. I was exhausted and disheartened when I found it. I remember that a dead army lay there, and I was terrified. Perhaps that’s where I died too. I remember knowing I had to enter a tomb to decipher my future-” I start, patches of memories and images emerging as blurred daguerreotypes.
“You’re a genius Iris!” Arthur exclaims, cutting my sentence and grabbing my shoulders.
I round my eyes in surprise.
“I remember, yes! We cannot reach the monastery walking in this direction,” Arthur continues, invigorated.
I stare at Arthur with a clueless expression.
“Don’t ask me why, but I am sure we have to go around the monastery. If we keep walking straight towards it along this direction we’ll never reach the entrance,” he explains.
I have no recollection of the memories I triggered in Arthur, but I trust his instinct. I let him take my hand and lead me, as he walks with eager haste on the ragged terrain.
In what I perceive as no more than few minutes we find ourselves in front of a fenced area, covered in moss and ivy. The light hasn’t yet faded, but the moon is up, suspended in a diaphanous sky made of thin blue air.
“This is the graveyard,” Arthur tells me.
The tombs are not visible, but perhaps they are buried under the thick green blanket bound by the fence.
“Odd the ivy didn’t grow outside the fence,” I notice.
Arthur hesitates a moment, then jumps inside the fence and says, “Come and help me.”
He starts moving away the leaves, ripping away the tangled forest of ivy. We work like worms digging into an apple, without ever finding the core.
I am on the verge of giving up when I feel a hard, flat surface. My arms are dipped into the ivy, and I cannot see what I am touching. As I am trying to define its shape and size I sense a large block of stone slide under my hands. The ivy retreats around it, before dissolving away from the whole graveyard.
And at ones all the graves are open before us, exhaling cold whiffs of unknown into the darkening night.