Nicolaas de Vries was just about to give up and leave when that man suddenly materialised in the shadows between the two columns behind him. About time, he thought as he quickly stood up and brushed the dust off the seat of his unfortunately black trousers. Nicolaas had been waiting for the past half hour, sitting on the cold stone steps of the monastery counting the cracks in the cement for lack of better entertainment.
“Ah, Nicolaas, how good to see you,” Brother Johannes said smoothly, hands clasped together and bowing his head respectively. “And to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I think you know precisely why I’m here, Brother,” Nicolaas scowled, “so let’s skip the formalities and get to the point, shall we? What exactly are you doing up on the roof every night?”
“Meditation,” he said simply.
“Continuous footsteps for six hours does not sound like meditation, it sounds like a tape stuck on replay. I’ve had countless complaints already from people yelling at me saying they can’t sleep well anymore because the sounds of pounding feet and, I quote, ‘evil hyena laughter’, keep echoing around the neighbourhood. And apparently it comes from the roof of your monastery, Brother.”
“The footsteps are mere sounds, Nicolaas. What matters more is how one changes as one contempulates thought in such a way so that it produces other matter,” Brother Johannes murmured softly, gently pressing the tips of his ink-stained fingertips together.
Nicolaas rolled his eyes and sighed. He would have to consult somebody to check up on Brother Johannes soon; the poor old man was not entirely sane.
Some years ago, the number of brothers in the monastery had plunged due to lack of interest, with many priests becoming artists in favor of the “New Age” art craze. Brother Johannes had been the only one left in the once-crammed monastery after only a few months, but still clung to the old building, refusing to have it knocked down despite many generous offers on the land. He claimed that the building had special properties that made it doubtlessly important , and kept insisting that it was “absolutely magical”. Brother Johannes had raved so much about his precious monastery that he had become known as that man, the crazy old man that lived in a run-down building. The monastery was already centuries old, and the peeling paint and crumbling walls made it fall just short of a ruin. Nevertheless, the council had decided to leave Brother Johannes alone and let him live out the rest of his secluded life as he chose; besides, it wasn’t as if he could hang on to it forever. They figured it was only a couple of more years before old Johannes would finally kick the bucket and it would be the go-ahead with the new apartment complex. Lately however, the monastery had been the cause for more complaints than usual.
Now, these footsteps. Those were new.
Nicolaas found himself baffled. Why on earth would somebody suddenly start walking around their roof at night? And, Jesu, could they do it any louder?
Looking around impatiently, Nicolaas’ eyes landed on the top of the monastery, which was a good three or four stories from the ground, including the two small extensions on the roof. Standing at the top of the stairs in front of the main entrance, he could see the dull iron railings that ran around the perimeter of the roof. As he studied the outline more closely, a thought struck Nicolaas like a sharp slap.
Oh my Lord, that roof…
The roof was not normal. It wasn’t sloped like Nicolaas’ and everybody else’s, or even flat. From what he could make out squinting up into the unusually bright fall Dutch sky, the edges of the roof were jagged. Or, to be more specific, stepped.
I bet there are stairs on that roof. And I bet that’s what Johannes is doing every blasted night. Climbing blasted stairs. The man’s not exactly an athlete, so I can see why he might want to lose some pounds here or there. God knows why he laughs like that though.
“Johannes…—”
“Brother Johannes, if it pleases you,” he cut in rather haughtily.
“Fine, Brother. Could you please stop making such a racket at night, whatever you’re doing?” Nicolaas asked. “Climbing stairs are good for your health and all, but there’s no need for you to go and wake up half the town.”
Brother Johannes visibly caught his breath before quickly rearranging his expression to a suitably wary one, raising a cautious eyebrow. He was silent for a long while, looking intently at Nicolaas in an unnerving way that made him exceedingly nervous for no apparent reason whatsoever.
“Er…well then, farewell and good afternoon, Brother.” Nicolaas said awkwardly, taking his silence as an affirmative. “I’ll drop by soon to see if everything’s all right, ’kay?”
With that, Nicolaas de Vries, veteran member of the Amsterdam police force, hurried away as if the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels.
Leaning heavily against the stone column beside him, Brother Johannes stared after Nicolaas’ rapidly retreating back and sighed, closing his tired eyes.
The noises didn’t end that night. Nor did it get any quieter, for that matter. In fact, one or two people claimed the sounds were even louder than the night before, although Nicolaas suspected that was only because they had heard of his unsuccessful confrontation with Brother Johannes and wanted to rub it in.
True to his word, he dropped by the monastery again the following day. This time, he tried to be more patient and open-minded in reasoning with Johannes, but that was more easily said than done.
He still wasn’t prepared.
“Would you like to see?” Johannes asked.
“Er…what?” Nicolaas replied dumbly.
“Would you like to see the roof?”
“Oh…er…sure,” he said, although he really couldn’t see the point. They was just stairs.
A few minutes and some huffing and puffing later, the pair reached the roof. It would be an understatement to say that Nicolaas’ jaw scraped the floor of it.
Because they weren’t just stairs. They were stairs that ran around the edge of the roof forever, continuously, ad infinitum…While a bemused Johannes looked on, Nicolaas ran up and down the stairs and somehow ended up exactly where he had started. It was a most unsettling sensation, as if he were terribly itching to scratch somewhere but could not for the life of him figure out where. He was an onion, and every step he took stripped away another layer of worries, thoughts, fears…Nothing was holding him down now, and he felt weightless to the point where he slammed his foot against the stone steps with extra vigour just to ensure he wouldn’t all of a sudden be lifted straight off the ground. A hysterical laugh of ecstasy escaped his throat, a barbaric noise that sounded foreign even to his own ears as it echoed back to Nicolaas. But the moment he stopped, Nicolaas recoiled and winced with an aching pain as everything came plummeting back from the void to weigh him down again. There was another feeling too; a desperateness, maybe. A drive, probably, compelling him, commanding him, charming him, wickedly whispering, You never have to feel like this again, if only…
If only what?
The next morning, people in the Haarlem Quarter of Amsterdam, Holland, reported what sounded like two pairs of feet pounding all through the night…
1 comment:
all of the creative writing,, both poetry and prose are excellent thus far,,, i am thrilled to have found you at such an early post... i will place this in my reader and see whee you are headed...
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