He chanted. The name became a mantra, losing all meaning; it was a beautiful name with nice vowels and a foreign sound. He repeated and repeated and repeated. The intense fear that had crouched in his stomach started to fade, and for the first time he really allowed himself to think how silly this all was; how foolish and juvenile and desperate and impossible and insane; how there was no monk who saved a village by chaining a demon and releasing him only after he did his bidding; how there were, in fact, no such things as demons who walked the earth after midnight, or at any other time for that matter; how if there were such things as demons he hadn’t the slightest notion of how to force them to transform him, or even how to plead with them; how all those people who disappeared either really ran away or just died—the way he would.

Then, at first like a gentle kiss, here, there, light but unmistakable. Rain. Soon it was falling in a downpour. Water and water. The candle had long ago been doused. Now he sat with the water soaking him, streaming into his eyes and his mouth. A joke, he realized, this had been an elaborate joke he had played on himself. He was sixteen years of age and out in a rainstorm in the wee hours of the morning, calling on ancient demons to save him from—from what?—from himself? He noticed he was crying; hot tears stung his eyes. He shivered and slumped, and finally sprawled on the wet earth, cold not with the freezing cold of winter, but with a surface chill, like swimming in the ocean after dark in July.

He was not aware of the rain stopping or of the cloud drifting away from the crescent moon. He just lay there, wet and shivering; even the sobs had gone, leaving him with an empty feeling of exhaustion and confusion. His was the sudden feeling of falling down a well, knowing no one will come to the rescue for days. The dread of a horrible, inevitable, known future.

A voice. Where? In his head? In his mind? In his soul? It was the voice of a chorus, a host like the host that welcomed Jesus to the earth on that starry night in Bethlehem, and at the same time the voice of a wizened old man racked with pain, and the very voice of pain and anguish and sorrow itself, and the voice of lust and hate and war-torn plains with wind whistling and whispering through trees, the voice of wisdom, old and all-knowing, and the voice of foolishness, ignorance, and childish bliss. But a voice. One voice.

The voice said: Come.