Devotees

by Andrew Dugan
Issue 16: Consumed | 4,454 words

Photo, California Historical Society, San Francisco.

The monasteries are eating all the men. The floors are caverning out, the cobblestones aligning into rows of teeth in Antibes and Kent. In Rome.

The men they eat are abbots and deacons. They are bishops laced in gold. They eat new converts who have not taken their first baths. Two scribes illuminate a manuscript at a time in case one is devoured.

The monasteries eat at odd hours. They eat when the brothers disband from the refectory, at the singing of psalms, and on Christmas Eve. They eat as Mass begins. They eat when it ends. They eat during funerals and swallow the sleeping in beds before dawn. They open and crash against themselves like lashing whirlpools.

After having its man, the Belly of God seals itself up. Nothing remains, even the bones are gone. The living monks exchange looks before picking up their gardening shovels. Before they return to cellars and to kitchens. Before they negotiate the price of grain with peasants. Before they fix the crumbling eastern wall of the dorms. Before they gossip, “I hear we’re eating ham tonight for dinner. Is that true?”

The Abbot at Godsteath turns twenty-five today. He celebrates with a morning walk from his chambers, down the empty hall, across the stone-cold chapel, past the kitchen, and to the cellar. It is January. He tops off a mug with moldy ale.

He drinks as the sun rises over snow, bathing the chapel in yellow light. He winces at the taste. “Piss.” His observation impresses no one. The wooden pew creaking under his weight could be mistaken for a laugh. It’s been six months since the monastery ate the last of his brothers.

Why has it not taken him?

Opposing him, a crucifix hangs above the altar. Wrought-iron chains suspend the bleeding Christ from the ceiling. So freely hung, he sways at the slightest disturbance. The Abbot wants to replace this image of perpetual suffering with something to make him forget his dead friends. A nativity, perhaps. A portrait of the Pope. Anything. The crucifix only reminds him of the brothers he lost. How they all swallowed their fates. How none tried jerking out of the monastery’s mouth. Few shrieked and tensed up. Most smiled. Some writhed in ecstasy, rolling their eyes over and over in their cracking skulls.

He remembers the last man the monastery ate: Godsteath’s old abbot. It happened at the end of a good, summer day. Dirt and sweat glistened off their bodies. Garden work. “Tilling,” the old abbot explained. He shared stories disparaging Rome as overrated and calling the since deceased monks “thicker than pig shit.” A perfect day. Just as they broke inside for dinner, the floor swayed and swirled out around his teacher’s feet. The monastery would eat him in the cloisters, the forgettable hallway which joined the refectory to the sleeping quarters.

The walls trembled.

Coolly, like something had just occurred to him, the old abbot reached for his pupil’s hand, “Grapes should be harvested by the end of the month.” He was eaten slowly but said nothing else. The Abbot heard him die and then went to bed.

He is six months gone. All the Abbot can do now is remember and wait.

This morning, the bronze door to the chapel opens. The Abbot looks over the end of the pew. Morning sun strikes his crusted, grey eyes.

“Hello?” the stranger’s voice might be quiet but his footsteps clamor on the stone floor. “Is anyone here?”

Catching sight, he scurries to the Abbot. “The bishop sent me.”

Odd. The bishop hasn’t assigned anyone to Godsteath in years. Then again, who even is the bishop?

The stranger can’t be more than a year older than the Abbot, but he is older. Taller too. Sweat crystals speckle his earlobes, his bushy eyebrows. Did he run all the way here? His robe barely covers his limbs. The hem is caked in snow. Frostbite licks at his thick ankles. How long was his journey?

“Are you the Abbot?”

Through sleepy nods, he gulps more ale. “You are in time for morning prayer. You should do the honors.” The Abbot does not know how to meet the Monk’s eyes.

The Monk scoots into the pew beside him. Kneeling with clasped hands, his reverberant voice is convinced of itself.

“…as it was in the beginning…” the Abbot hears before finishing his drink and shutting his eyes. They are in the center of the nave.

The monastery watches. No one is eaten.

••••

They breakfast on opposite ends of the refectory. The Abbot chews through his cheese and watches the Monk chip his tooth on stale bread. It’s impossible to say whether cooking stopped after the monastery ate the last farmer or kitchener. In either case, what’s left was enough to survive. For at least one mouth.

With bowed head, the Monk approaches the Abbot. Will his footsteps always be so loud?

“Where do we sleep?”

“You want to sleep? After breakfast?”

“Well, change my stockings more like.”

He gestures to the wet, riddled wool at his shins.

For safety, they sleep across the hall from each other. If one is eaten in the night, it will take less time for the other to realize. His room is large for a new monk. There are, of course, no senior members to force the Monk into junior beds. So, the monastery’s appetite is not without perks. The bed frame is sturdy. The writing desk unmarred with caricatures of dragons.

The Monk rests on the edge of his mattress, the Abbot goes to the desk chair. His new joy is either copying the stranger’s moves or analyzing them.

In the silence, he intuits a question from the Monk. “It’s been a few months,” the Abbot says, thinking the Monk must only wish to know when the last man was eaten. What else was there to focus on?

“A few months since what?”

“Since—” And then, the Abbot sees it. Of course, this is why he’s here.

He has heard about men like the Monk—men with such a profound calling that they disinherit themselves from their hungry buildings. The wrath of the monasteries has nothing to do with them. Besides, will they honestly be eaten? New blood is better at this ignorance. Whereas incredible loss has aged the Abbot. No, robbed him. The Abbot entered the brotherhood believing and now… But he cannot let the Monk know this.

“Never mind. I will expect your help here. Every job is available, so have your pick. The cellarer, the sacrist, the almoner, and infirmirer.” His eyes well with tears. “Illuminator and choir master.” These men had names before they were swallowed.

The Monk’s eyebrows crease as the stony room saturates with grief. “Whatever you need.”

Excusing himself, the Abbot goes to his chambers where his gaze rests on a snowy, desolate hillside. The pear trees in the yard are all bare now, but, in other warmer months, he remembers wrestling with his brothers for the fallen fruit. They kicked their sandaled feet in each other’s faces. The roundsman scolded them, his voice paltry like the dinner bell, “Stop that! Imagine if the townsfolk would see you rolling around!”

Ten days from that rebuking, the roundsman would be eaten. Over seven grueling hours. For a while, the floor had only taken his ankle in its mouth. Painful but not lethal. While they waited for a sign, the Abbot poured wine down the dying man’s throat. He laid already dead, speckled with vomit and bleeding by the time the floor took the rest of him.

Snow sloughing off the roof cuts the Abbot’s remembering short. A curious squirrel must be scaling the arches. When snow piles drop a second and third time, he opens his window to the cold winter air. It hooks the back of his throat. Another falling clump nearly decapitates him.

Above, the Monk peers over the edge. Filled with the joy of working, he can’t help but press a smile. He waves the gardener’s shovel. “Snow is heavy. Our roof could cave in.”

The Abbot watches his muscles do the work of lifting and tossing, with an athletic ignorance to the cold. His fully stretched arms mock and split the Abbot’s gaze.

“Don’t believe me? It happened to us in Normandie.”

••••

As the leader of a two-man brotherhood, the Abbot is now the ABBOT. He must show discipline and pray the Liturgy of the Hours. He must lift his soul in the middle of the workday and beam with the Holy Spirit even when his back pops with infected boils, he has ten ingrown toenails, and all his friends are dead.

There’s a reason for all this resolve. It ensures the continuity of their profession. The resoluteness of their work. One day, the Monk’s faith will falter. Everyone’s does. At such time, the Abbot will need to rest his hands on the Monk’s shoulders and spew, exquisitely well, all the faith’s convincing dribble about submission and a calling to reaffirm his brother.

He wants to exude gravitas. His leaders and mentors had gravitas. The Abbot lends himself this with a cane that he does not really need. The cracked and oaky thing belonged to a brute who died from pneumonia before the monastery could eat him. The cane’s former owner had an appetite for slamming the blunt end into his brothers’ skulls as punishment. This fell out of fashion when the floor began to eat people alive. Punishments came to a natural close. Some pupils missed the cane’s ability to refine their tongues and still overactive nerves. Without their master, they succumbed to crying fits at meals. It is possible to miss anything.

The Abbot meets the Monk for their first dinner in the refectory. He expects the Monk to understand the cane’s history and instantly revere it.

“Did you hurt yourself?” the Monk asks, slopping up stale oats and water.

“Yes.” He compulsively scans for brothers who would discredit him, but those people are all dead. “I fell down the stairs.” There are no stairs in the monastery.

“Sorry.”

He forgets the stick. It was a stupid idea. 

Candlelight swims across the Monk’s face. His top and bottom lips are firmly stacked together, pressed with natural resolve. Gravitas. The Abbot never noticed how the Monk’s chin cleaves the air. How everything parts for him.

He stares for a second too long. “Something you want to say?” the Monk asks.

“Did,” the Abbot nervously burps, “did the bishop mention anything about this place?”

“Not particularly.”

“About me?”

“You didn’t come up.”

“You mentioned you came from a brotherhood in Normandie.” At this, the Monk replaces his wooden spoon. Its clanging fills the rafters. “Godsteath is a long way from there.”

“We have a call to duty,” the Monk says, lingering on duty. The word adulterates all it touches. The Abbot suddenly feels watched. “We go where instructed. For me, that meant coming here.”

“For what? Praying? Working? There is no work here and even less to pray about. Do you see there is only death? Only waiting?”

“That might be true for you.” The Monk smiles through the last of his oats. “Do you ever tire of drinking and rambling?”

“Never drinking, only rambling. Do you tire of pretending to believe in all this?” The Abbot gestures to the empty refectory.

“I have given everything to my faith and—”

Mockingly, the Abbot cuts in, “What commitment! We should gather the other monks to witness your testimony.”

An icy wind zips through the limestone wall, slides underneath their frocks. The Abbot warms his calves with his palm.

“You dislike me.” The Monk remains so still and in control.

“Everything was easier before you came along.”

“You mean drinking yourself to Judgment Day?”

“Remembering was easier. Waiting was easier.”

The Monk’s silence scares him. The Abbot ought to have just gone to bed. But, while here, he asks, “Why would you come to a monastery where the monks are all dead?”

“I know you. You think your past makes you special. Every monastery is losing men. Only you have let circumstances steal your faith. Others go to chapel. Others know there is work at hand.”

The Abbot stammers, “No other monastery lost everyone. Is that right?”

The Monk locks onto something behind the Abbot’s eyes. “Is it so important? Your brothers were eaten, and who’s still here?” The Monk leans in, his breath hot with the smell of ash. “But then again, where would you go? Even if you could leave. You’re a non-believer and a drunk.”

The Abbot stands as the Monk makes for the door, his cane sliding and ringing against the ground.

The Monk stops. “Actually, maybe I am wrong. There is something you believe in.” He taps his shoe on the floor, calling for it to open.

••••

Their grain stores wane. The Abbot destroys casks of ale without help. After the Monk’s remarks, he discovers new things to hate about himself. 

Meanwhile, the Monk prays on his knees in the empty chapel—eyes to the ceiling. When not on his knees, the Monk eats three stale meals a day. He dusts. He keeps the Liturgy of the Hours. He sleeps in the evening and wakes before dawn. He transcribes Paul at his desk, door ajar. And the Abbot hears every scrawl through the walls, every torn page soiled with insignificant error.

The Monk has made a sprawling, dead monastery annoyingly claustrophobic. Every commitment to meaningless work strikes as an insult.

So much of them is waiting for the other to give up.

Their most revelatory interactions are tiny. They catch the other in the hallway, the Abbot plodding to the cellar and Monk marching to chapel. The Monk’s gaze never meets the Abbot’s but passes straight through him to the other side of the world. It is here, pressed close in stone corridors, when the Monk’s brusque gait entrances the Abbot and draws him to a realization.  

He probes his suspicions after midnight. Kneeling in the hallway, the Abbot peers through the crack in the Monk’s bedroom door and confirms it: the Monk has shot up an inch since first arriving at Godsteath. Maybe one and a half. His spurt is not the work of food, rather a change only won by immense purpose. Conviction’s divine touch is at work across every inch of his brother’s solid frame. Even when the Monk hunches over his manuscript by candlelight, it is undeniable. He’s grown.

All while the Abbot’s skin stretches tauter over his ribs.

There, crouched in the hallway, the Abbot finds he cannot stand up. The day’s ale hits him at once. His cup rolls from his hand, and face collides with the frigid floor, pulling him in.

Maybe this is his time. He drops down one shoulder, then the other. His last thoughts before sleep are the mealy taste of spittle and the Monk. He prays not to be found like this in the morning. That the monastery saves his pride and swallows him. He begs it with a whisper. “I am ready to go. Believe me. Please believe me.”

••••

This is no mistake. He wakes in bed with the blanket pulled up to his chin. He would never tuck himself in like this.

Winter sun dries his room out in white. Manically, the Abbot scours for his shoes. He knows the Monk did this. He wants to run to the Monk and ask him questions like “How heavy was I?”, “Was it easy?”, and “What was it like to hold me?” All that disgust for his brother gives way to giddiness. He slips his tremoring body through his frock. When was he last touched?

From his window, he sees his brother headed down the path, footprints spoiling an otherwise twinkly sheet of pure white.

The Abbot sprints for the first time in months. He calls but the Monk doesn’t stop. By the time he catches up, his hot breath hammers at the back of his throat. Exhausted.

“Hi.” The Monk does not want to speak. He has slung a large empty sack over his shoulder. The Abbot keeps pace despite the cold.

“Sorry if I woke you last night. Bad sleep. Did you move me?” The snow is loud underneath their feet.

Faint birdsong fills the air. Quickly, it seems winter might really yield.   

“Where are you going?” the Abbot says like an apology.

“We need food. And there is nothing to bargain with unless an ale cask magically evaded you. Hopefully the townsfolk respond well to begging.”

“Please do not go. There must be some food stores left.”

The Monk is all austerity as he shrugs and trudges forward. The Abbot struggles behind, placing his feet in the Monk’s packed footprints.

“I am coming with you.”

“No thank you. You will only slow me down.”

“That matters less than walking in the right direction.”

It works. The Monk acknowledges him. Rays halo round his head, blinding the Abbot’s unaccustomed eyes. Squinting, he smiles, flexing towards the forest that flanks the monastery. Its trees are pregnant with snow. “Town is that way. Unless you want to turn a few hours’ trip into days.” What a thing, to know more than someone else. He leads them into the brushy, frozen thicket. Here, the finches sing louder.

••••

Nightfall and town could not be further. Above them, the moon. For the Abbot, it is meal enough to watch the wind ice his brother’s black hairs. After hours, their footprints eclipse themselves. Now, the Monk fishes under a cool pool of snow in search of chestnuts.

The nightly shadow of Godsteath surprises them through the glen. “Impossible,” the Monk says. “You are, somehow, an even worse navigator than abbot.”

High off an invigorating walk, the Abbot allows the comment. It seems he may never need to eat again. They trample back through the empty fields.

The Monk’s ankle catches on an upturned patch of dirt, and he falls. The Abbot hurries ahead to help him back up, to dust the snow from his curly-haired calves.

“These fields need tilling. Someone should tell the abbot.” He laughs, but the Monk’s mouth splays flat in one ugly line. The Abbot recognizes something like a crack in his brother’s dimples. Could it be tears?

“I do not need your help,” the Monk says. His slight quivering erupts to a full sob. “If the floor could only swallow you up, I might get on with my work.”

“Listen, I know I have distracted you from your calling—”

“Leave my calling alone. You forgot yours years ago. If it was ever there at all.”

“Maybe I lost it with my brothers.”

“Brother!” It is the first time the Monk calls him this. “Everyone loses everyone!”

The Abbot bites his tongue.

The monastery does not. Humming to them, the opening floor moans and then blares like a war horn. Its hunger crashes against the rafters. It has been seven months since the building last called out.

Instinctually, the Monk sprints to the opening floor.

Just last night, the Abbot dreamed he’d been eaten. He begged to finally know true submission. And now, the Monk is jumping to sacrifice himself. Well, let him. A fist tightens all the Abbot’s organs into a neat little ball. And as the monastery absorbs the Monk’s shadow, the Abbot knows he was wrong about one thing. His faith wasn’t swallowed up in the floor, but it was there: flying across snow mounds. The Abbot blushes with the wisdom and launches after his brother. He does not exist without the Monk.

But the Monk is fast. His gait widens as the floor and its mouth nears. Salvation hastens him.

Inside the corridor, where the old abbot was eaten last summer, the mouth is already shutting. Its dark violet swells turn greyer under the collapse. The stone tiles rearrange themselves from teeth to solid ground. The Abbot tackles the Monk, pins him to the threshold. His brother reaches out for the caverning floor.

“Let me go! What have you done!” The Monk reaches out, crawling under the Abbot’s weight. The monastery mouth hypnotizes him.

But it is too late. That boisterous horn ceases. The floor solidifies.

When he realizes his chance has passed, he collapses.  Curling away from the Abbot, he says between sobs, “You ruined everything. You ruined everything.” His habitually porcelain face glows a sloppy red.

The Abbot stands up, peering at his fetal-positioned brother.

Did he really rob him of his calling? Or force him to investigate it further?

“You are right,” the Abbot says. “You do not need me, but I need you.”

The confession stills the Monk’s sobs. He sniffles. Pushes himself up off the ground back to his rightful posture: towering over the Abbot. There it is, the Abbot thinks, that unfractured, studying face again. Purpose has righted his Monk.

“I need you,” he says, again. And now, it is the Abbot who breaks into light, salty tears. In a preordained response, the Monk presses his nose to his Abbot’s cheek, kissing the drops away.

••••

Their love is small and grateful.

Next morning becomes every morning: meeting in the chapel over stale gruel. Standing next to each other, they recite psalms in normal sequence. Performing their faith for the other is enough.

“You should give a sermon,” the Monk says to the Abbot one day.

“About?”

“Anything.”

So he speaks about the last abbot eaten by the monastery. How he gave the most punishing penances, how his voice at Mass was deep and melodic like a cow’s. Then, he recounted the lives of the kitcheners, farmers, scribes, and punishers. Each of their names, birthdays, and deaths were summated in their last words: I believe in Saint Augustine. I think my neck is going to hurt forever. I wasted everything. The Abbot omits which limb went into the floor’s mouth first, how long the monastery took to feed, and if there was a lot of blood.

And the Monk gives sermons too. His go well into the night and recall his unhappy childhood— that of a farmer’s son, and all that poverty taught him about submission.

These are just shared words about their lives, but, because they call this practice worship, it becomes as much.

At night, they sleep together. The Monk shows the Abbot what he learned from the brothers in Normandie. “When I was sick, the kitchener showed me this, and I felt much better.” The Abbot does not know what’s medicinal about the act, but he cannot help but bloom and die under the Monk’s thrusts. Their excited moans build to sound like the gnashing floor. And then it is over. They collapse giggling. Sweat colors their bed.

“What if we left?” the Abbot asks one night. Nestling into the Monk’s arm and chest is Scripture. “What if we left right now?”

“Why would we go?” the Monk asks.

The Abbot mishears him. “We could go to Paris, maybe.”

“Why.”

They are in God’s house, doing His work, the Monk explains.

The Abbot does not resist. His leadership is finally working. He is THE ABBOT. He leads his monks down a righteous path. He kisses his neck.

••••

The Monk eats dandelions in April. “Try it,” he says. The Abbot is unconvinced of the weed’s taste. The Monk closes the space between them on the grass, shoves the stem into his mouth. “I said try it!”

And the Abbot relents, parting his lips. The Monk presses the yellow bud to his tongue. He kisses the dirt away, hand delicately supporting the Abbot’s chin as he chews. 

“There is something I want to show you. Stay here.” The Monk hops up and retreats to the monastery.

The Abbot rests his head back against his palms. Bees hum at the end of his nose. A southern breeze sends the trees into a quick frenzy. In their rustling, the leaves cast green light across the farmyard.

The Abbot must consider what to plant in the fields. At some point. Or maybe not. He grinds dandelion meal between his molars and swallows. Everything they ever need is right here.

Wind mutes the Monk’s screams. When it dies, they are unignorable. He was going to come right back. He is inside. The Abbot’s Monk. He starts to his feet. Blood rushes to his heart. He runs, trips over himself. His Monk is inside, wailing.

Somehow it is worse than he imagined. The bedroom floor chews through the Monk’s tendons, his left anklebone. The Monk’s other foot is wedged at the outer edge of the floor’s mouth but loses grip through the pain. His body is being sucked down. The Abbot falls and grips his brother’s foot. Wretches at him, but the structure has a hold. The world is so loud.

No, the Abbot will not lose him. He cannot. How is it they were just outside and now he is to lose him?

He searches the Monk’s eyes for an answer, but they are distant, blue stars. The Abbot believes that the Monk is meditating on passion somewhere beyond the pain. And maybe this is why he stayed in Godsteath. In loving the Abbot, the Monk only wanted to fulfill his calling and sell his body back to God.

Or maybe the Monk wants to live. With him.

“Help me.”

The Abbot obeys, pulling at his brother’s hand. What was once the strongest arm ever known, now feels disconnected to the Monk’s body. Limp and already dying. A cobblestone tongue laps up his blood.

There was a time to leave, to forget their callings. Now, there is nothing to do. Even through his brother’s rabid yelping, the Abbot knows this. They have both submitted to this end.

And, when the Monk needs a firm hand to remind him of purpose, the Abbot responds with a push. Pressing the Monk’s knuckles to his lips, he feeds all the man’s hand into the stone mouth.

In his brother’s eyes, there is all the fear of the world. He strains against what has already been decided. The floor makes him a part of it. The structure crashes against itself until the Monk’s veins, muscles, and bones churn into a human paste. The earth drinks down the grog. Then it seals itself, like it did with the old abbot, and the abbot before him, and the farmer, and the kitchener, and the brewer, and the choral master, and the choral master’s friend, and his enemy, and his lover. It took them all. And the Abbot kneels there.

Not one tear falls until it is over.