The Monastery (aka experimenting with a new novel idea)
Should its secrets stay buried?
Hi there and happy April. I left off my last newsletter by sharing an idea I had to write a gothic novel about the Ancient Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach having a life of its own. It all stemmed from its curious backstory, which you can read about in the link below. It’s a good read if you are wondering how on earth North Miami Beach could possibly be home to anything ancient.
Now comes time for the experiment: the start of a new story (that ever so tricky task). I love beginnings more than any other part of the story. How many do I go through before selecting a book from the library or bookstore? Lots. There’s so much promise in beginnings. Have I promised enough intrigue here? Have I even started in the right place? Will I have to whittle it down and start over? First drafts are messy and time will tell. Today, you get to take a peek at that very fragile early stage of work, where I’m still deciding if an idea has staying power. Happy reading.
Content warning: religious themes and evil curses, but nothing graphic
The Monastery
Miami, 1955
Only two times of the day mattered: sunrise and sunset. Salvador kept meticulous track of the seasons and the changing length of the days so that he knew, to the minute, when the light would vanish from the monastery grounds and when it would return to chase away the night. There would be a time when even one minute made all the difference.
Though it was hard to believe that time existed in this place at all. The carved ceilings, columns and arches seemed to be built from centuries of prayers rewritten into the poetry of medieval gothic architecture. Even Salvador, who loathed it, couldn’t deny its beauty. Cursed things were often beautiful.
When he stepped on the path to the monastery from the parking lot, he had 24 minutes until sundown when his watch officially began. The length of the days was the only real way to know that the time of year had changed in these balmy, evergreen surroundings. Endless summer in South Florida only added to the monotony of Salvador’s days of sun, rest and preparing for the dark hours. There was no changing it now: no real magic in the Magic City that could give him a different life. He’d taken an oath, and an oath of this nature could not be broken.
The monastery welcomed his arrival with an almost imperceptible swell, standing taller, straighter at the sight of her keeper. The archways yawned wider, awakening from slumber. The vaulted ceilings stretched toward the heavens.
Salvador ignored the invitation. He spat in the general direction of the doors. The monastery was always inviting at dusk. The stones would catch the last golden rays of daylight like a treasure, begging anyone who noticed to linger past sunset. Only he was fool enough to do that.
He went straight to the small house on the edge of the gardens to retrieve supplies: vials of holy water, a wheelbarrow of salt and an elegant steel sword tipped with pure silver, a family heirloom crafted by sword-smiths in Toledo that would have been out of place everywhere in Miami except beside these ancient stones, impossibly reconstructed and stolen from another place and time.
He scanned the gardens and the exterior walls, silently measuring the lengths of the shadows cast by the stone building. He was a shadow, too, not because of his dark hair and black clothes, but the way he moved in the background, unnoticed and silent. More than once, visitors would swear he was a ghost, that he had simply dissolved in the shade of the monastery and disappeared. But he only did that at night. Blending with the darkness was easier than fighting it, and shadows only vanish in the dark.
He pushed the wheelbarrow of salt to the outside of the monastery walls and prowled the perimeter, inspecting the line he drew each day. When rain, wind, insects, or other disturbed the border, he replenished the salt to keep it intact. The landscapers were forever irked that they couldn’t plant anything within several feet of it. How nice it must have been to only worry about plants.
When he was satisfied with the salt barrier, he entered the main building and walked briskly through the cloisters and chapel to make sure all the visitors and staff had left before closing the heavy oak doors and meeting the groundskeeper at the exterior gate. The last couple of cars, the office manager’s black and white Chevy and a visiting family’s blue Studebaker, were crunching over the gravel parking lot beyond the gate as they left. Salvador scanned the lot for the groundskeeper’s beige station wagon and spotted it alone. Good. No stragglers.
“Time to lock you in again, Sal,” the gruff groundskeeper said. The metal gate clanged as he shut it.
“You’re not locking me in, Mick. You’re locking everyone else out,” Salvador said.
Mick turned the key and scratched his balding head. “You never told me why you got a sword. I’d be carrying a gun if it was me.”
“Guns are intimidating to be sure, but this thing,” Salvador gestured to the gleaming blade at his side. “It’s mostly ornamental, just part of a uniform.” It was a lie, but the word “mostly” lent it some truth. Most of the time, he didn’t need it.
“I never heard of a monk carrying a sword.” Mick glanced at the weapon and squinted as if Salvador could have been hiding more behind the elegant silver hilt.
“I’m not that kind of monk, and this isn’t an active monastery. It’s a tourist attraction.”
“As you say. Looks sharp for a decoration, but I suppose you know best. Things have been better since you arrived. Not like it was during construction. They said it was accidents, but I still don’t buy it.” Mick shook his head as if trying to shrug off the string of tragedies it took to stitch the monastery back together. He peered at Salvador, waiting for him to share his opinion on the matter, which he never did.
“It was a fool’s errand to reconstruct it, but here we are,” Salvador said.
“Here we are,” Mick agreed, accepting that as confirmation of conspiracy. He dropped his voice even though they were quite alone and asked, “Do you know how to use it?”
Salvador removed the blade from his belt with reverence. Quick as a blink, it flashed and a corner of the nearby shrub outlining the path fell to the ground.
“At least make the cuts even!” Mick said. “Now I gotta fix it with some shears.”
“Forgive me.” Salvador looked up at the sky, now much dimmer than when he’d arrived. “But no need to fix it tonight, my friend. Save it for the morning. I’ll meet you back here at sunrise.”
“Yeah, yeah. Alright. Good night then.”
Salvador sheathed his sword and made the sign of the cross. Mick stepped back, allowing Salvador to be the last one to touch the gate. Salvador placed his open palm on the iron, exposing a ghostly white slash of scar. “Good night.” The wind encircled Salvador and pushed him back to the monastery with increasing force, an unspoken need driving the movement. “I’m coming,” Salvador said. “Don’t be bossy.”
He followed the path to the main doors. He always did one last round through the chapel and refectory before he made a fresh line of salt at the doors and locked them. The doors flew open, already alive with urgency.
“What is it?” he whispered. At his feet, the salt line was blurred along the path as though something had been dragged across it.
“Did you do this?” he asked. The knocker on the door rattled in irritation. “It’s a fair question, given your history of tantrums.”
There was no further answer. Salvador sighed, and slipped inside. His hand grasped the hilt of his blade. The sunlight was already gone, the courtyard within dark. He scanned the area as he kept his footfalls silent. The ribs of the vaulted halls tensed, as if holding their breath. The breeze he’d felt outside had vanished. The dangling roots of the banyan tree in the courtyard stilled like dead limbs.
Salvador stopped walking. He kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on the insignia of one of the armorial corbels carved in stone on the wall. He looked down at the terracotta floors as shadows slithered over them. The wall shuddered beneath his fingers. Those shadows were not for him. Their unnatural velvety black looked too deep to be a real shadow, as if he could fall into them. The smell of decay and wet earth enveloped him, and a moment later, smoke. A bloom of orange light erupted from the chapter room across the courtyard.
Salvador unsheathed his sword with a swift swish. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,” he whispered. He ran toward the fire.
A sole straggler still within the walls of the monastery ran from it, screaming out of the chapter room, the echoes bouncing off the vaulted ceilings as if a chorus of men were trapped in terror.
“Wait!” Salvador called out as a thin man raced across the darkened courtyard. Only his back was visible.
The man didn’t stop. Salvador moved to chase him, but a growl rumbled out of the fire and beyond the archway entrance of the chapter room, loud enough to vibrate against his skin. He turned to the entrance, his sword was steady and ready for the end. Wisps and whispers of dark desires snaked toward him. How easy the end could be. No more oaths. No more service. Join the flames, the whispers said.
He steeled his mind against the things that called to him: the scent of lavender from his childhood home, the silk of a woman’s dress beneath his outstretched fingers, his brother’s weakened voice, help me. None were real. However he was bound to this place would end, and by any means necessary, he would end it before it ended him.
The screaming man from the courtyard didn’t wait to meet what had lured him, what his ambition had let loose upon the world. He ran. He ran over the salt across the threshold and out the door, taking some of the darkness he saw with him into the night.
Fantastic opening. Intrigue, suspense, and some backstory without an info dump. Keep at it, Salavdor can't be left to the dark.
Oh wow, definitely drawn in, Brenna! Yes, go write it!