06 Aug The Cloister

My name is Sherman Lane. Sherman, like the kid with the glasses in Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and Lane, like the butler in The Importance of Being Earnest.

I own a shop in the Haight in San Francisco. It’s a small occult shop named The Arcane located at the end of a small alley, Lillian Hellman Street, named after a writer of no small repute. Leave it to a bunch of men to name a narrow urine-soaked alley after a famous female writer and to name the wide boulevards after male politicians and real estate developers. And in San Francisco of all places!

The Arcane sells incense, Tarot Cards, herbs, books, candles, readings, anything to do with the occult. Sometimes I get kids in that want to know where the video games are, and I explain to them that the name is Arcane, not, well, you get the idea.

To make ends meet, I’m a bartender two nights a week at the Iron Door in the Mission District. It’s a dive bar. A den of ill-repute doesn’t begin to cover it; Good Lord, some of the things I’ve seen!

But I make great money. I’ve never understood why those with the least are more generous than those with the most. I got my first twenty-dollar tip from a guy who looked like he didn’t make that much in a week. I made him laugh and, in his world, that was something.

Sometimes bad things happen there, but I keep a blackjack behind the bar. A retired, old-school cop gave it to me to help keep me safe. Back in the day, the cops used to have things like that so that they could reach a quick understanding with people they were questioning. A retired cop who had seen and done too much, who was slowly killing himself with the liquor that I poured him, was concerned about someone other than himself. It says a lot about us, doesn’t it?

It was a nasty thing: leather strap for a handle attached to a leather enclosure filled with lead shavings. It could knock somebody into the next week if used on their noggin. I had only done so once. Word spreads in The Mission.

I pay my bills, personal and business, every Saturday morning at my desk in the cramped, little office behind the cash register at the shop. I’ve got a computer, a couple of grey metal filing cabinets that somebody left on the curb a few years ago for anybody who needed them, and a landline phone with two lines that rolled over if someone was on the first line. There was a small sound system in there that played new age stuff for the front of the shop. You know, Enya, Ottmar Liebert, Lorena McKennitt. That kind of thing.

Early one October Saturday morning, the phone rang. I almost jumped out of my skin. I’m always tired and on edge, and nobody ever calls before opening. Our hours and directions to the store are on our website, and we’re not really known for picking up the phone in a timely manner anyway.

I was ready for a break from paying bills.

“Hello, The Arcane.”

“Sherman? That you? Yeah, that’s you. All this time, you still sound like you.”

“Patrick?” I knew it was Patrick the moment that he said my name. He had been my best friend, my absolute best friend, and we had some sort of a falling out when we were twenty-three, twenty-four years old. That was a long time ago, and it didn’t matter much what had caused it at that point in our lives. We were in our thirties now, the same age, thirty-eight. It just didn’t matter, and it was good to hear his voice.

“What are you up to, old friend?” In addition to my eyes being red and itchy from fatigue, they were getting misty, and I rubbed them while cradling the phone between my head and shoulder.

“Hey, I’m the restaurant manager at a hotel in Cambria, the Monastery Inn. Been there for a few years. I’m going to cut to the chase, Sherm. I need your help, something I think you and nobody else can help me with. I found you on Facebook a long time ago. Ha, ha. Nobody gets to escape their past.”

It didn’t take much to guess what he meant by needing my help. I had an uncanny ability to see things that no one else could see. My mother, God rest her soul, could see things, too. She spent a lot of time with me on those things: the Tarot, dreams, and the like. Romanian, she came from a long line of family that she generally wouldn’t talk about, but I knew. I could see bits and pieces; the fragments of a mother and child steeped and entwined in the mystical.

My dad was of good old English stock and was a very good accountant from what I heard, but clueless to my mother and my secret life.

“Yeah, yeah. I guess I can help. What do you need?”

“I need you to perform an exorcism, Sherman. Please don’t laugh. Just come and help me out.”

I had planned on taking a week off work. I was more than a little burned-out. I really couldn’t see stiffing an old friend like that, especially when I had already arranged to take the time off. Cambria was only a little more than five hours away.

A few days later, I was taking the scenic route in a rental car. Most people in San Francisco didn’t need a car, and I was no exception. Plus, my money was all tied up in the shop.

I drove down Highway 280 towards the misty Central California Coast. I thought about what Patrick had said, and I was afraid. Afraid for him, maybe a little afraid for myself. Nothing about the vague reasons that he gave for needing me there felt right.

I took Highway 17 through the Santa Cruz Mountains to Highway 1 South. I drove through Santa Cruz, Monterey and then into the forests of Big Sur, stopping at Nepenthe for lunch. I had a twenty-five-dollar cheeseburger and a twenty-five-dollar glass of pinot noir.

Perched on a cliff high above the ocean, with its Beat Generation, mystic gift shop, expansive wine list and sweeping ocean views, I felt as if I was on a real vacation. As it happened, it was not to be representative of the task that lay before me.

The road ahead was the true portent of my trip.

Highway 1 became circuitous, with hairpin turns and sharp drop-offs to a rocky shoreline hundreds of feet below the road. Hazardous on a good day, suicidal when being tailgated by a large RV as I was. Short dirt pullouts with terminal drop-offs randomly placed on the roadside were inadequate to escape the RV, and I tried to balance speed with safety. I could imagine the RV’s brakes smoking from the rapid downhill descent.

Once I was on the other side of Big Sur and at sea level, I pulled over, let the RV pass, and got out of the car. I breathed deeply of the salt air, watching hundreds of elephant seals on huge rocks in the ocean: sleeping, swimming, and living their lives.

I made a mental note to stay on Highway 101 next time, if there was one. It was not very scenic, certainly boring, and much safer.

Patrick had said that he had kept tabs on me through social media and knew how to reach me through the occult shop. I’d had the shop for years, making me easy to find. I hoped that didn’t turn out to be a bad thing.

He had been working as a dining room manager at an upscale hotel in Cambria, California. It was an old landmark building, a monastery in its former life. Two wings of hotel rooms, a restaurant and banquet rooms had been added over the years, but the main building and the grounds remained.

The hotel sat up on the hill that overlooked Cambria, a spread-out three-story thing with a Frank Lloyd Wright vibe, including a signature feature that the first owner had added: a re-routed stream, a brook that ran through the middle of the dining room. A couple of small footbridges joined the halves of the restaurant together. People could sit next to a real river-rock-lined stream in the dining room.

There was lots of rough-hewn wood, many windows, and open beams made of massive timbers. There was a large redwood tree, native to the area, growing through the roof of the dining room. Rooms facing north had a view of the small downtown village at the bottom of the hill, and beyond that, to the west, the ocean.

After arrival and a long-overdue hug, Patrick gave me a tour of the property and invited me to stay in the extra room of his little cottage, which he had been given as a year-round employee. As I unpacked my few belongings, Patrick told me it was formerly the groundskeeper’s home back when the monastery was in operation.

Hydrangea lined the brick path on the way to the porch, and fuchsia hung from the open beams of the porch in little moss baskets. Dating back to the monastery, Luke 22:36 was carved in the lintel over the door. It was quaint and homey.

The sound of waves crashing a couple of miles away on Moonstone Beach could be heard, and a full moon charged the dusk air, giving a feeling of energy and expectancy.

Pine trees and redwoods were thick on the outskirts of the property and freely interspersed inside the grounds as well. Everything felt fresh and alive.

“So, Patrick, what is this about? Why have you, and don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did, contacted me after all this time?”

He wanted me to perform an exorcism. Not my specialty, to be honest. Sure, we masters of the occult had read the lines that anybody who had seen The Exorcist would know.

“I cast you out, unclean spirit, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

Yes, we knew the lines and used them to great effect when someone was acting up at the bar back in the Bay Area. But knowing the lines and performing the rituals is a dangerous distinction. Best not to take that leap of faith, the Fool’s Journey, without a mentor.

I stifled a smile, “So, who is the recipient of this exorcism?”

Patrick said, “Me, Sherm. I think I’m being haunted by the spirit of a murdered nun.”

Keeping a straight face, I listened intently as he gave me the back story. A tragedy had occurred, a story blurred by time.

He told me about the tour, Haunted Cambria, that had made the hotel and the tragedy the crown jewel of the tour. While the first stops on the Haunted Cambria tour gave out little hors d’oeuvres, the last stop at the hotel ended with cocktails in the lounge. The tour guide, with lights dimmed in a hushed cocktail lounge, would tell the story of a nun, murdered by her jilted lover when the hotel was a monastery.

The tour guide, in a hushed tone, said, “Late at night every October the dead nun walks the halls of the original monastery structure. Keep an open mind, and you, dear tourist, might see her, too.”

The locals would show up on tour nights, telling the tourists horrifying stories that they would recount to one another afterward, laughing, trying to outdo one another.

Patrick told me that the men in town, after a few beers, called the nun’s misfortune the Cloister Fuck, which unvaryingly earned them harsh stares from the local women who did not think it very funny.

Realizing by the look on my face that I, still under the influence of my San Francisco sensibilities, didn’t find it particularly amusing either.

He muttered, “Sorry, my friend. I’m just telling you what I hear.”

Shaking it off, I laughed at his discomfort. “I’ve heard worse than that, believe me. I work in a bar, too, you know.”

He looked relieved and continued with his story.

The local historian, Valerie Schaefer, who worked at the visitor’s information center, had sworn by her version of events, even telling her story to a reporter for the local paper, The Pinecone.

The story, as told by Valerie to the Pinecone: A nun in the 1850’s was having an affair with the groundskeeper of the hotel. It didn’t end well. She was raped and murdered by the groundskeeper. It was never proven, and anyone involved had long ago passed away.

Changing our clothes, we went to the restaurant in the hotel and dined. Patrick had arranged for our meals to be on the house, and he was greeted by employees and locals alike. The chef had prepared an amuse bouche for us as well as a special dessert. It was all quite nice. I couldn’t help the feeling that I would be paying for it all in some fashion or another.

The guests of the hotel watched us to see if we were celebrities and, determining that Patrick worked there, returned to ignoring us.

Patrick continued with his story. The hotel had been a monastery, where monks and nuns all lived together; that much was already established.

A stone basement beneath the main floor currently was home to the housekeeping department, wine and liquor storage and offices for the lesser management positions: maintenance and housekeeping. It was in these original depths of the property that Patrick said that the partially clothed body had been found.

He had begun to have dreams a couple of weeks ago, he said. In the dreams he witnessed the murder of the nun as if he was the nun. She had begun to talk to him in his dreams. She told him to call his old friend, Sherman. The persistence of the dreams, the sleepless nights, had all conspired to wear him down. He called me.

I told him that I was no expert in these matters, but I would do what I could. I told myself that I could make a visible effort for a day or two and then spend the rest of the week at the beach while the Indian Summer weather was still nice during the day.

I dreamed that night. I saw a nun in a long black dress with a black bonnet lined in a white material. Her habit and bonnet appeared heavily starched. The cloth was thick and unbending and it rustled as she walked. Carrying a candle in a holder, she began gathering her laundry, alone in the stone-walled basement. Startled, she turned, hearing a noise behind her.

She tensed when she saw who it was. “I told you that I couldn’t see you tonight.”

A man’s voice, face flickering in and out of view in the candlelight, said, “I’m tired of waiting for you.”

He sounded drunk. There was a tonal quality to his voice that I would not soon forget. Even though I could not see his face and he was long dead and gone, I would remember him.

The nun looked alarmed. She backed away from him. “I told you, my vows are too strong. I can’t anymore. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise.”

She turned back to her task, folding her clean garments.

Angered, the man pushed her into the stone wall, her head making a loud cracking noise as it struck the irregular rock. Blood pooled on the floor.

He pulled up her starched dress and pulled down her undergarments, and he had his way with her lifeless body.

While he was forcefully, angrily having sex with the poor nun’s body, she impossibly turned her head in my dream and looked at me. She looked at me with infinite sadness. I was terrified.

Please, sir. Let me in. I need your help. Her voice was in my head. The words weren’t spoken; they were thoughts.

I saw what happened to her and I thought, yes. I said yes to her in my sleep. I thought that I could help her.

I’ll never really know if that was the right or wrong thing to do.

Before I awoke, I saw Patrick. He looked quizzically at me, and I told him, “This is real, Patrick. This is not a dream.”

I awoke, sweating, sure that I had cried out in my sleep, but Patrick had remained in his room. The clock on the nightstand said that it was two in the morning.

I was possessed of the nun’s spirit; I was sure of it. Concerned and disoriented in my new surroundings, I soon fell into a deep sleep anyway. I awoke and kept the night’s dream to myself.

The tour of the property continued that morning. We walked through the gardens, which were themed rooms bounded by tall, well-tended hedges for walls. Each room contained a vignette of biblical or garden scenes to fit the whole monastery concept. The vignettes were created by floral colors, topiary and statues.

We walked through room after room in the garden. At the center of the gardens was the Cloister Garth, a traditional monastery garden in a cross shape with four quadrants and a central fountain. The garden was planted in a profusion of herbs, lavender, roses and lilies. A plaque at the base of the cross explained that the roses and lilies represented martyrdom and purity.

We walked and talked. Patrick told me stories about the hotel and staff. Mohammad, the busboy, had escaped Iran literally with the shirt on his back. His parents had paid an oil freighter captain to hide him on the ship and get him out of the country. How he got to the United States is a story that he refused to tell.

“I’ll tell you about Kay. She’s the hostess. I’ve never had a woman infuriate me or turn me on more than her. She’s either too smart for me or too smart for her own good. The jury is still out.”

Some of the cooks had crossed the border from Mexico. Their cousins or friends would return to Mexico and gift their friends heading north with their social security numbers. One week a cook would leave, and a week later a new cook with the same name and Social Security number would arrive. Nobody seemed to mind, nor should they, Patrick said, if the Social Security card was a valid number.

“Chef used the mole poblano sauce that one of their wives made. Fantastic stuff. And speaking of the chef,” he continued, “Geoff, the chef, his wife left him. Hardly groundbreaking news in the restaurant business. Rumor was, he was having an affair with his sous chef. She was a pretty, young gal straight out of the California Culinary Academy.

“She just stopped coming in one day. Weird behavior for her. She seemed like she had more responsibility than that, but you know how restaurants are.

“I think his wife must have found out and the girl split town. Nobody has heard from his wife, either. Geoff’s been acting strangely: aggressive and angry, ever since all that happened. He’s no longer the guy that he was before. He was in a rage the other day with the dishwasher. Throwing plates, yelling. The pressure is getting to him.”

We walked on. One vignette caught my attention. It was a grotto with a white alabaster statue of the Virgin Mother with smaller statues of deer, squirrels, and birds looking up at her, enthralled, surrounded by red roses and white lilies. Her hands were held down with the palms outstretched, and her benevolent gaze was cast downward, presumably at the small animals.

Transfixed, my eyes glazed over, and I must have been locked on the scene for several minutes. Patrick patted me on the back several times with increasing intensity, “Are you okay?”

Seeing me refocus my eyes, he said, “You had me worried there for a minute. It was like the way you used to look at Mona Atkins, ha, ha.”

He referenced my first crush in junior high school; a girl whose mere presence made me catatonic.

“Very funny, Patrick. Something about the statue of Mary. I dunno.” I shrugged my shoulders, no more clued in than he was. We continued looking at more of the garden, the traditionally and marginally funny flower bed, flowers planted in a real bed frame, a wall of lettuces, and herbs near the back of the restaurant’s kitchen.

We walked through the kitchen; morning food preparation was well underway. Carrots, onions, and celery were being chopped for a mirepoix, tomatoes were being diced and heated in hotel pans, and pans were being taken from the Alto-Shaam ovens to the steam table on the cooks’ line for lunch service.

Patrick greeted the cooks by name, and he introduced me to the chef, an intense fire hydrant of a man named Geoff. I shook his hand, and the strength of it was off-putting. Must come from working in a kitchen, I supposed. We continued to the dining room.

Apparently, a group of fashion models had checked into the hotel the previous evening for a photo shoot at Moonstone Beach. I was beginning to feel cautiously optimistic.

That morning at breakfast, the models and their crew had taken over half of the tables in the restaurant. Patrick and I sat down and ordered, gratefully receiving cups of hot coffee, heaping plates of pancakes, bacon and eggs.

The models ordered practically every plate on the menu, and the food servers struggled to keep up with the demand. They were dismayed when the models picked at the food, pushing away plate after plate. Clearing plates as quickly as they put them down, the servers were additionally overwhelmed making and serving the lattes and cappuccinos that the models couldn’t seem to drink fast enough.

One of the models, apparently with an eye for Patrick, invited us to join them that evening for cocktails. We said an enthusiastic yes!

When she left, Patrick said, “Okay, I’m working lunch and dinner, but I get a break in the afternoon. Let’s catch up then. Check out the town or relax, and I’ll see you around 2.

“We can have a late dinner and then cocktails with the models. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

He laughed as he walked away.

I spent the day alone walking through the little downtown with its boutique shops and restaurants. One of them served an absolutely stellar Olallieberry pie. I hoped that I got the chance to revisit it; it was so good. I drove to Moonstone Beach and sat on the smooth, translucent pebbles that gave the beach its name. I watched the waves and enjoyed the little sanderlings, the shorebirds, being chased by the incoming waves and then following the ebbing water, pecked the pebbly sand for sand crabs.

Back at the hotel and later in the evening, Patrick and I had dinner and a few drinks with the models.

Patrick was as charming as he ever was while I, as usual, didn’t stir up a lot of interest. I retired to the cottage. Despite the nice day that I had, the fear of the strange dream, what might come next, and the preexisting burnout were wearing me down.

I drank a bottle of Santa Lucia Pinot Noir with a fire in the fireplace in the living room, drinking and dozing. Patrick went to the beach with one of the girls, and they had sex on the beach. He returned to the cottage later that night very happy.

I was happy for him but, rather than listen to a, pardon the expression, blow-by-blow of his exploits, I turned in for the night. It wasn’t long before I was in a lucid dream, lucid and beyond my control.

I was in the garden standing near the statue of Mother Mary. I was on my knees praying to her, something that anyone who knew me would know was unlikely. I found it immensely comforting. I sensed, rather than heard, another person, and I turned my head to see the chef standing a few feet from me.

“You shouldn’t open old wounds, little one. I see you. I see your nun, my nun, in there.”

There was a murderous look to him, and I sprang to my feet so quickly that it startled him. I ran, ran to the back door of the kitchen and he chased me into the basement where it had all begun. I was cornered by a very strong and capable man in the same room where he had killed before, I thought, with no way out. I could feel the nun squirming inside me with a justified terror from the events revealed in my dreams.

All the while he spoke, he moved closer and closer to me, making sure at all times that I had no way to get to that doorway. Closer and closer. He was tactically positioning himself, like a guard in a prison cornering an inmate. There was nowhere to escape to.

I remembered the tone in his voice from my first dream. It was the man who killed the nun!

My heart sank…

He lunged at me just as I swung the blackjack that had been tucked into the small of my back in my waistband full force. It made a sickening crack, the same sound that I remembered from my dream when the nun was killed.

The nun’s voice in my head told me, “This is real. This is not a dream.”

He fell to the floor, dead. He was dead, and I was alive. I will never forget how good and horrifying that felt.

I dragged his body up the basement stairs, something that I never could have done in the waking world. I carried him through the garden to the grotto with the Virgin Mary. Finding a shovel in the groundskeeper’s shed, I buried him beneath Her protective gaze, carefully replacing the sod.

I heard the nun’s voice one last time, “Sherman, my name is Sarah. Thank you.”

I felt a warmth from Sarah, and then she was gone. I awoke in my bed in the spare bedroom in the groundskeeper’s house. Every muscle in my body was sore.

Patrick was standing over me. “Sherman, I got a phone call. Geoff the chef is dead. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

He continued, almost sobbing as he did, “The girl, Celeste, the model, that I was with last night, the staff this morning found her naked, face down, dead, in the stream in the restaurant.”

He looked at me intently. “Anything? Does any of that ring a bell?”

I shook my head. “No, man, I was here all night asleep. You know that.”

“No, you weren’t. You left for a while. You didn’t say where you were going. You didn’t say anything. You were weird. You came back about an hour later. You weren’t yourself. You seemed confused. I threw you in the shower. You were covered in dirt. I burned your clothes in the fireplace. They were covered in blood. I’m going to the beach now and throw your blackjack into the ocean as far as I can.”

He looked at me, dead serious, “None of this ever happened, okay?”

I nodded my head in understanding. We looked at each other, and we said nothing.

We found out later that Geoff had a black dahlia stuffed in his mouth. Betrayal and doom.

There was a sign on the restaurant that it was closed for a few days.

I guess I killed Geoff. I was possessed by a vengeful nun, and I killed him. His choice, willingly letting a malignant spirit in, and it was a death sentence. He killed the model. The nun killed him; I was there in a dream.

Our minds like to fill in the details of the things that we can’t comprehend. Cognitive dissonance, maybe, but I am only left with a sequence of dream-like events and the sensation of touching Sarah’s soul with my own.

In the end, I left her spirit there at the hotel. She seemed happy. It would be a long time before I saw Patrick again. We kept in touch, though. He invited me to his wedding to Kay, the hostess. I’m not too sure I’m ready yet.

I guess the county sheriff’s department tried to solve the case, but as half of the murders in the country go unsolved, why shouldn’t that one?