Inside the cloister of the Monastery of the Eastern Gate, Friar Dominic stood in a vacant posture, a thin young monk trapped somewhere between dither and doubt, his arm outstretched toward a dirty black rope that hung on the outer wall of the church. He yanked at the rope without ever looking at it, and the smallest bell in the tower clattered out. “The bell with the wooden tongue” they called it, because it was cracked and gave a poorly defined sound capable of carrying across only a small distance. Still, the bell gave him courage because it would bring others.
Friar Dominic had been passing though the cloister when he heard a voice in the Cyst, which had once been the nest of the Oracle Quiet Testiyont, who was now dead. Still, a few of the brotherhood had reported hearing a faint utterance in the last month. The Cyst was a hollow built into the wall—too small to be called a room and too big to be called a recess—with a small aperture that allowed in a minimum of daylight and air and for the prophecies of the Oracle to be heard. In many ways, it was a typical anchorite dwelling. There was just enough space to be walled in alive and still manage to exist, and more important, to be separate from the world outside. Over the years, its dimensions had changed to accommodate the different shapes and sizes of the beings who formed the long, unbroken chain of oracular occupation. Now it was a remnant, the Cyst cracked open and the Oracle’s body gone. The ragged hole was waiting for a new sacred body to be sealed inside.
The rules stated that the person closest to the voice in the wall must approach and record its sayings, before calling others to witness. But nobody ever wanted to be the first participant in this phenomenon, and most avoided that corner of the cloister. Especially after the Oracle died. The piece of charcoal that hung on a string near the Cyst to record such divine grace was damp and faded. Unused. Now Friar Dominic’s hand was reaching out for it.
The Monastery of the Eastern Gate sat in deep seclusion. For centuries, it had guarded one of Earth’s darkest secrets. Every monk there knew the function of their home. Some embraced it; some ignored it, giving themselves over to other duties of prayer and dedication. A few had been turned mad or inverted, but most just got on with their allotted tasks and pushed the vast abnormality, which was in the daily care of the monastery, to the back of their minds.
Each novice who wanted to be admitted to the abbey had to witness what made it unique. Afterward, many ran away and never returned. In a few, the sight planted a seed of insanity deep in the putty of their minds that would slowly grow to infest their souls. Most saw it only once, but a few demanded an annual exposure. Dominic had been taken there by the ancient Friar Cecil when he was thirteen years old.
“Beyond this gate lies a great walled enclosure that sections off a portion of landscape down to the sea’s very edge. Three square miles of confined isolation in which rages a perpetual war between the living and the dead.” Friar Cecil watched the boy closely as he spoke, searching for signs of terror or disbelief.
He had performed this ritual chore many times and thought he knew every conceivable consequence of what he was about to divulge.
“What you must understand is that what you witness is not a manifestation of evil but the workings of the mind of God.”
He had said these sentences so many times before that the words seemed to have lost their vitality and meaning, in the way that over-washed patterns of color maintain only a pale impression of what they must have been.
Friar Cecil waited a moment for the young man to absorb his words. When he saw the flinch of acceptance, he placed the vast iron key that he was holding into the lock of the iron gate. As he turned the key, he explained, “For the living, this is the only way in and out of the enclosure.”
Before them stretched a dismal road lined with trees of oak and ash. Beyond this rose a gray, featureless wall that went on for miles. Dominic stopped to look about himself and then back at the abbey, which seemed to have shrunk disproportionately to the small distance they had walked.
“There are no windows on this side of the abbey,” commented the boy.
“It is better that way. Nothing to distract us from our duties.”
“But there is another door, a small one. There, at the base of that towerlike structure.” He pointed to a newish windowless door in the ancient stone.
Friar Cecil ignored him and did not look around.
“That is for the abbot’s use and does not concern you.”
They walked silently for a while in the unkempt field that seemed a terrible waste of land to the boy. They reached a hump in the field that enabled them to see what lay below. Sounds and a wafting stench arose from nowhere, making the boy shudder, and the smoke smeared the dense air, burning his eyes.
“Brace thyself.”
As the old monk spoke, the view unzipped into growing focus and accumulating detail, revealing a great battle, where thousands of bodies clashed in ferocious turmoil. Grim reaper armies struggled against citizens of the undead, or those who did not know which they were. The volume increased as the scene became clearer.
Dominic watched grinning skeletons hack apart men, women, and children. They fell, rolled over, and were frozen stiff for a moment, before struggling to their knees, dragging their separated parts together, and rising to fight again.
“It’s always the same,” shouted Cecil over the racket. “The same victims are forever punished and butchered, and then arise, pulling back together their hacked limbs and picking up their dented, rusted weapons to push back against the always-triumphant troops of bone and savagery.”
Dominic was frozen to the spot, watching the skeletal army’s ruthless, impassive joy as they executed and tortured all who attempted to stay alive.
“This is the Glandula Misericordia,” shouted Cecil. “The Gland of Mercy. In the real world, it forms a balance and an expectancy of the day-to-day existence of death. This is the Mercy that God has given us, and as long as this epic tableau continues, humankind will be protected from facing the horror and numbing reality of the pointlessness of life, and therefore the futility of faith and the belief in the Almighty.”
The young Dominic aged as he witnessed the perpetual Mercy. His innocence was being stripped away with every disgusting sight that assailed his childhood ideas about the glory of God.
Friar Cecil saw how transfixed Dominic had become and tugged at his arm. “I think you have seen enough for one day, or for a lifetime.” Cecil tried to break the spell and move the boy away, but Dominic would not budge. Only his head moved as he scanned every detail below.
“You must not become enraptured here. They will see you and want you to join them.”
The resonant echo of a hurdy-gurdy joined in with the screams and the sound of crackling flames.
“You have seen enough.”
Dominic turned to Friar Cecil as if only just remembering he was still there. “There is a king down there in a spillage of gold coins.”
The bright, shocked vacancy of his words moved the old monk.
“All the world is there, my son. And it is our duty at times to bring the world here to see. His Holiness in Rome has sent many kings and potentates here.”
“Some are laughing and playing at dice.”
Friar Cecil had no reply for such incongruity and confusion.
“Who is the naked man who sits so alone?” Dominic continued to question.
These words jolted Cecil, who looked from Dominic’s face into the writhing field of conflict.
“Where?” he asked.
The novice pointed toward a dark, broken archway. In its shadow stood a white naked man with his eyes closed. Cecil turned away, grabbing Dominic’s arm.
“You have seen too much,” the monk said, and steered the novice back toward the retreating path.
The sound and stench drained away, and the boy asked, “How can all this be kept secluded, hidden from the world?”
“It is not hidden; it is unseen,” answered Cecil. “You can feel the influence of the wind without seeing it. Very few have actually seen this place, but all have benefited from its existence. Its power blows through our monastery and across into the villages, the cities, and the world. And those in power know it is the abbot and monks of this abbey who possess a direct relationship with, if not actual control of, the Gland. And the Oracle embedded in its walls is the focus of that conjunction.” They finally reached the gate. “The Oracle known as Quiet Testiyont is the most famous in living memory, which stretches back into centuries of forgetfulness. If you survive today, you will be allowed near his presence.”
Dominic did indeed survive the ordeal of witnessing the Gland, and during the next seven years, he had been present on several occasions when the voice in the wall spoke. But now the Quiet had passed, and there were whispers among the Brotherhood that what possessed the Cyst might be a ghost or worse. Abbot Clementine refused to discuss the matter and had little tolerance for any who did. He used his faithful Friar Cecil to keep an eye on the rest of the monastery and report his findings.
Cecil was not known for being the sharpest knife in the box. Prior to Clementine’s arrival, he had never been given any position or task of responsibility, leaving his inherent desire for sly servitude unrealized. The new abbot recognized something in Cecil that he could use and instantly proclaimed him as the Gatekeeper, the only monk who could take novices to see what existed beyond the Eastern Gate. This had been a wise decision, indeed. Cecil’s lack of imagination and intelligence meant that the horrors found in the Gland did not disturb him, so the novices felt safe, clinging to his unemotional indifference as if it were strength or faith. It also made him a devoted slave to the abbot, satisfying his every whim and his need to know everything that was going on in the abbey…which, at the moment, appeared to be nothing.
Then the whispers started again.
Dominic heard the impossible and knew what he was supposed to do. He grabbed the charcoal and scrawled what he thought he heard onto the lumpen plasterwork. As he scratched, Dominic looked around, hoping to see another person somewhere in the cloister—someone to share the moment with or, better still, someone to pass the moment to—but the cloister was deserted.
The sound came again, and something in its muffled insistence forced him to lean even closer, almost putting his nose into the ragged gash and peering timidly inside. There was an unease that shivered between the need and the consequence of that intimacy. He stooped there a long while, listening for any sound that did not belong to the open courtyard or to the busy world outside. Dominic let go of the distractions and was about to concentrate on the wall when the tiny sound of a skylark, far beyond all human noise, distracted him. Its constant velocity dipped and spun. For a moment, he was there with it, soaring above the abbey, removed from the endeavors of man, weightless, bobbing in the sunlit air.
Then what was in the Cyst bellowed, and Dominic fell back into darkness.