Dominic was woken by the memory of his own voice speaking clearly again. He was confused about where he was: this narrow room wasn’t his cell; the window was in the wrong place. Where was he now? What had happened? Maybe his voice was trying to tell him. There was a great calm in the room, sunlight shafted across the floor, and motes of dust floated languidly in the undisturbed air. There were five beds, but four were empty.
What had his voice been trying to say? He was just about to ask when his mother spoke to him.
“Domi, you are so good at sleeping, always have been.”
He looked down and saw himself sleeping under a gray blanket; nobody else was in the room.
“Where are you, Mumma? I can’t see you.”
“Here, my boy, by the stove, next to Anna.”
Dominic moved his head from side to side, but the body in the bed did not. He realized he was on the ceiling looking down.
“I can’t see the stove, just some beds. I think I am in one of them.”
As he looked closer, the left arm of the sleeping body began to shake violently.
“Wake up, Domi, you are having a bad dream. Please wake up and help us find your father.”
The arm went limp and the body in the bed opened its eyes and looked at its mother. It tried to speak but could not.
“His voice has been stolen, too.”
The floating Dominic heard his voice out loud for the first time.
“Get dressed! We must start a search beyond the farm. We have looked everywhere. I can’t think where he is; all the horses are here.”
His mother pulled the blanket off the bed; the Dominic there was trembling and much younger.
“But, Mumma, Poppa is here no more. He is in Heaven with little Anna.”
“What are you saying, you cruel boy?” Her voice began to falter, the words coming apart as their sound gained a different weight. “What are you saying?”
“The great illness that swept over this land saw them both away last winter.”
“No…noo…nooo!” she wailed and looked anxiously around the room.
“I slept through it all, and when I awoke, it was just you and me. We tended the farm by ourselves until it came back for you. When I woke up the second time, you had gone to join them. I found your poor dead body.”
The old woman walked backward away from the bed, one arm outstretched, ready to find the door handle and escape. As she did so, she looked up and saw the floating Dominic talking to her.
“Save me,” she whimpered as she opened the door and disappeared.
Dominic would have found none of this surprising in his old home, in those years when he had to look after the farm by himself. The plague had little interest in the animals, and those that survived starvation multiplied and grew. He’d managed to keep half the crops going, and the chickens were abundant with eggs. For two years he fed and watered them and himself every day, until people began to drift back into the depopulated lands. He had experienced death at close range, and its trauma had been replaced by a numbing fear that transformed into dense acceptance of the dead, who visited him to ask where they were. That was when his voice faded away and he had nothing to say.
When the priest and the three nuns found the silent child, they’d quickly taken him under the protection and care of the church. They also took the farm and all its troubles off his hands. By the time he entered the Monastery of the Eastern Gate, Dominic was speaking again, shyly and with much hesitation. The ritual initiation of visiting the Gland of Mercy appeared to have had no real effect on him. Friar Cecil reported the novice’s lack of reaction to Friar Benedict, who had a great curiosity about the interface of innocence and corruption in the human soul. But Benedict had absolutely no tolerance for obsequiousness, stupidity, and laziness—the three qualities Friar Cecil possessed in abundance. Detecting Cecil’s disappointment in the novice’s response to the Gland made Benedict even more contemptuous of the abbot’s favorite lapdog and twitched a bead of interest on Benedict’s long rosary of curiosity.
His terseness weakened and gave way to sympathy when he met Dominic and heard of the boy’s experiences and attitude. He took him under his spiky wing, a place most novices would have shunned.
The boy had grown strong and tall, and his voice had remained intact until now. Whatever had shouted at him from within the Cyst had caused him to regress. The return of his mother to the room in which he had been recuperating was a vexing and disturbing occurrence. The part of his consciousness that identified the sleeping body on the bed seemed able to talk, even if only to a ghost.
“What will become of me?” Dominic asked himself, and the body in the bed turned to look directly at him. They stared into themselves until an answer came.
“Vanished!” a high shrill voice cried in a space outside the somnambulist’s realm.
“Vanished!” it screamed again beyond the valerian-coaxed separation, which instantly dissolved.
“Vanished!” it yelled, over and over again, and Dominic knew this was a memory inside a dream. The first time he had heard it, it had had nothing to do with him. But now that he had dreamed it again, he knew that his voice had not been permanently stolen; it had just been rudely borrowed.