There was only so much “guidance” that could be tolerated with a monk’s academic research, and Benedict would take no more censorship and patronization from the abbot. He would continue his investigation into the creatures and demons that were infesting the land and the abbey. Moreover, he would do it with greater relish now that he had seen the effect the subject had on his “Father Superior.” Distaste, fear, or something stronger had disclosed a weakness in the abbot, and it smelled like a secret. Benedict would put all his might into exposing or exasperating it. So, with his typical ruthless obstinacy, he would accept the abbot’s accidental “advice” and deepen his knowledge of the subject.
The old monk would use the insult as a command—a key to the long-locked inner sanctum of the library. He would quote the abbot’s scorn in a slant that would allow him to be in the company of old, forgotten volumes, scrolls of demonology, and hierarchies of unnatural beings in the Kabbalah.
This task he undertook ferociously, sending novices scurrying in and out of the library’s every nook and cranny, seeking every word or image on the anatomy and origin of these creatures that God had never created. He was, of course, now far too frail and injured to take on such strenuous physical labors. His vigor must be focused on scholastic endeavors, where he had already made impressive progress. He had already laboriously annotated Saint Augustine’s De divinatione daemonum, one of the very sources that the artist Jerome, the Brabantisch Lame-Vanger, was rumored to have used when visualizing such monstrosities. Of course, he had never seen any of the works of this Jerome who, since his death, was now called Bosch; most hadn’t. Benedict had suspected the rumors that abounded inside the holy orders, rumors of the horrors this obscure artist produced, were exaggerations invented by others who had never laid eyes on the actual pictures. The abbot’s announcement that Bosch had died years ago, far from taking the wind out of Benedict’s sail, had sharpened his resolve to find an answer, a conclusion. So much better for a scholar never to meet the subject of his investigations rather than ask him what things mean or how they came into being. That would be the ultimate act of empirical misdirection.
Benedict had recently heard that one of the noble families who supported the abbey had such a painting in their possession. Since that disgusting thing’s attack in the kitchen, the old monk’s curiosity had deepened into resolve. He was beginning to think it was his duty to witness one of these “masterpieces” in the flesh. Because the flesh had proved itself real, and he wanted to understand the relationship between the artist’s imagination and the reality of the new life-forms that were infesting his home and his peace of mind. To his logical mind, there could be only two possible explanations, and they were both evil, heretical, and unthinkable. The first line of thought was that this Bosch had willfully created pictures of these atrocities without reference to anything at all; they were pure fiction. But surely this was impossible, how could one man create an entirely new unnatural history? And if so, how did these things become sentient and slide off their canvases into the real world?
The second possibility was even worse. Bosch had opened a portal into Hell or some other dimension, allowing this vile bestiary to enter a Christian domain, so that he could make portraits of them and secure his reputation forever. There was some evidence, albeit secondhand, of recent witch trials where some of those accused said that they had “modeled” with demons before the artist in his studio in ’s-Hertogenbosch. Normally, Benedict would have ignored such fantasy as foolish tittle-tattle, but certain parallels were beginning to take shape. These were his main lines of explanation. All other notions about the generation of these beings placed his scholarship in direct opposition to his faith and life thus far.
Benedict had no intention of stumbling into the blind footsteps of the Wuursbergian brothers. He was far too canny to court martyrdom on such a troublesome road. His crusade was to become an expert on these creatures, to fuse his technical and esoteric knowledge, so that he might be called on to inflict injury or oblivion to every one of them. Especially those that he now believed had burrowed into the walls of his home.
In this new fervor, he needed help…someone younger, who had physical and moral strength. Benedict had become cautiously impressed by Friar Dominic, having kept an eye on him since Cecil’s miserable description. Even the way Dominic conducted himself when his voice was stolen suggested sensitivity and stoicism.
Dominic was sitting on the edge of his bed, reading, when Benedict arrived. The young monk was surprised and a little intimidated.
“How are you feeling?”
Dominic nodded and stroked his throat, followed by a small hoarse whisper that did not gather into words.
“Don’t try to speak, not in daylight.”
Benedict pulled two candles from his pockets and held them out to Dominic. “Take them and cross them over your heart.”
He waited until Dominic did as he was told.
“Do you know of the sacred works of Saint Blasius?”
Dominic shook his head.
“He was an Armenian doctor of great virtue and wisdom and a patron saint of illnesses of the throat and voice. And he, like our own good Francis, understood the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Except Blasius understood wild creatures, wolves. Perhaps like the dog you tried to draw so poorly on that crumbling wall?”
Even at his most benevolent, it was impossible for Benedict not to be acerbic. But Dominic did not hear it; he was enraptured by the story of this unknown venerated man.
“I have found his prayer, which sadly was forgotten for far too many years. Its blessing will return your voice during the night to come. Speak to nobody during the day.”
Benedict then retrieved the candles, still warm from the boy’s grip, and lit them. Holding the candles high over his head and incanting in a deep, resonant language, Benedict then brought them down and crossed them, still alight and dripping, across Dominic’s throat, under his chin. The old monk spoke three more words and then put one candle in Dominic’s hand and kept the other for himself.
“Tonight, Saint Blasius will be with you in your dreams, where you may search together for your voice.”
Two days later, Benedict recruited Friar Dominic, after persuading him that a nest of Woebegots had most likely infested the cloister wall. They, therefore, were the cause of his traumatic loss of voice, rather than the ghost of the Quiet Testiyont. Nothing like the Oracle’s voice had been noticed, but whispers and yappings had been reported. And all had heard the ungodly screeching of the word vanished in the stairwell. Well, perhaps they had not vanished but simply had dug deeper into the fabric of the monastery itself?
With the younger monk’s strength and energetic faith, Benedict would prove the sanctity of their home had been breached. He would accomplish this with or without the abbot’s permission. Fortunately, Clementine had been called to an ecclesiastical gathering three days away. In his absence, the brothers were technically under the guidance of Friar Thomas, a dim and vacant man whom Benedict could sidestep any day of the week.
So with the year sliding near the great schism between Carnival and Lent, and the absence of the abbot, Benedict decided it was time to discover the source of the mystery and mishap. There was nothing and no one there to stop him. He stood before the ragged gash in the Oracle’s dwelling with a small posse of monks, some armed with crowbars and axes. Benedict took his good working hand away from his twisted lip and raised it to bless the tools, the place, and the worthy brothers.
“It is God’s will for us to cleanse this sanctum from any malign beings that might now be infesting it. This is the Cyst of the last Holy Oracle Testiyont, of all those Blessed Ones that came before, and of all those that will come in the future,” he loudly declared, then stepped aside, pointing the trembling finger of attack that had so easily converted from the gentle curve of benediction.
Dominic, who had been released from his confinement in the infirmary, was anxious to join the venture and discover what had taken his voice. He stabbed his five-foot-long crowbar deep into the gash, skewering it violently and destroying the union of crumbling plaster, matted horsehair, and decayed brick. A great deal of material fell out of the wound. On the sixth or seventh thrust of the iron rod, something farther back gave way. The crowbar, so impetuously impelled, was sucked deep into the wall, a victim of its own momentum. Dominic looked startled, staring at his empty hands until two other young monks stepped forward and set at the wall with axes, adding cascades of loose dust and islands of surface plaster to the growing pile of debris. Soon a great quantity of the wall was gone, leaving only a gaping maw in its place.
Benedict raised his hand to stop the attack. One of the brothers pulled the last remnants away with a long-handled rake. They all drew closer, bending down to see what might declare itself in the nest’s destruction. Dominic balanced his crowbar like a spear, and Benedict fisted a crucifix like a dagger.
For many moments, they stared at nothing because nothing was there. Gradually their postures changed, dissolving the tense muscles of attack and the lean sinews of flight. Some stepped back, others stepped closer; one touched the loose, saggy wound with his hand: nothing.
“I fear we are too late,” said Benedict. “It must have escaped.”
He returned his crucifix to the chain around his neck. This action allowed the other monks to begin their own gestures of disappointment and departure, when suddenly a small movement in the rubble attracted their attention. The dust and fragments were being stirred, as if by the wind. Particles were in motion, a loose spiral, not unlike the rotation of cats before they settle to sleep. Dominic started to make a terrible sound in his throat, which was seeking the profile of words. Friar Ludo came to his side and stared into his face. He made the same sound again and pointed in little stabs at the rubble.
“He says,” said Ludo, “he says it’s his voice.”
“What is?” demanded Benedict.
“There, moving, there; it’s his voice,” answered Ludo, while Dominic nodded and pointed in frightful agreement.
The monks stared at the ripped wall and its little shelf of activity; no one moved because a great terror, a singular and vindictive root of unknowing, held them to the spot. A few loose stones, tufts of horsehair, and plaster fell to the ground. Then the movement bellowed in a language that no one knew, but that all understood: “Unyoked.”
Benedict was the only one to shake himself free of the spell of icy bewilderment. He grabbed his crucifix and held it out before him, the chain yanking his head forward, turning his dramatic pose into a surprised comic stooping that belied his command.
“I bless thee in the name of Christ. Depart!”
His voice, which should have commanded authority, exposed a quaver of uncertainty. It did unlatch the other monks, who now fell away from the wall, moving sideways and backward without taking their eyes off the voice’s invisibility. Soon only a tiny echo could be heard as if something were crying as it vanished.
A quick breeze entered the courtyard, chasing a few leaves and some of the debris around the cobbles. Its matter-of-factness broke the spell, and almost under his breath, Friar Benedict said, “It is done.”
A few drops of rain followed the breeze and the clouds leaned toward twilight with a wideness of sky. The monastery bell began to toll as some of the company worked with their brooms and shovels.
“Leave it. We can clear it away tomorrow.”
Nobody argued, and the call to evening prayer seemed a relief. The rain came in with a new bluster as the last monk closed the heavy gate behind him, allowing the locked garden and empty cloister to give themselves up to the growing dark.
Near the chapel, Benedict drew Friar Ludo aside and said, “Take the boy back to rest.”
“Yes, I shall, but tell me, what do you think was in the wall?”
“A manifestation of something gone or of something that is to arrive.”
“Not the ghost of the Testiyont?”
“No, not completely, that manifestation was confused. The Testiyont was never that. But there was a trace of it, I think, mixed with something else. But not evil, that is why I gave it a blessing, not an exorcism.”
Ludo rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “But it did steal the boy’s voice. Surely that is a malign act?”
“Did the voice, which shouted that last word, sound familiar to you?”
Ludo moved his hand to pull at his ear. “Er! Well…”
“Did it not sound like Abbot Clementine?”
Ludo’s eyes popped, and he crossed himself quickly. “It did, it did sound like him.”
“Then, perchance, what was in the wall doesn’t steal voices, it just borrows them.”
“For what purpose?”
“That I don’t know, but my faith tells me that now the Testiyont is truly gone.”
Ludo looked more closely at Benedict’s face. “At rest?”
“Unyoked.”