as if somehow in injuring herself she might heal her son. It’s all right, mamma, he wanted to say. It doesn’t hurt.

Darkness, then. The clip-clop noise of horse hooves, but this time he moved along with them. There were rushed, babbling voices, more weeping, a rough hand holding his.

Even Theroen could not entirely piece together the events that followed. Vast blank spaces lay in his memory, propagated by photo-flashes of consciousness. A bed somewhere, his father sitting in a chair, looking out into cold London rain and weeping without realizing it. Rough shadow of a beard, unkempt hair. Staring and weeping. It was the most frightening vision Theroen could recall, worse even than when the bottle finally took hold of the man for good. Theroen had never seen the man looking so forlorn, would never see him so again.

Another period of blankness, and then his mother, leaning over him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. She was singing to him, those old lullabies. He’d asked for them to stop some years ago, a young man in a child’s body, no longer needing the comfort they brought. But now? Oh, now they were comfort eternal. He was so frightened. These periods of blankness terrified him. There was nothing, except the knowledge of nothing, and he thought for the first time in his mortal life that he might be coming to understand what death was.

Ah, if he could have cried out, he would have wailed. Little heart racing at the thought that there was nothing more, that there was no heaven, no God waiting for him at the gates, ready to embrace him and comfort him and help him to understand what it all meant, this mortal life.

More grey. Then the vision.

A doctor, a nurse, and his mother. She was arguing, fighting, weeping again. The doctor looked sympathetic, but firm.

“There is nothing we can do. We have bled him, tried every potent tonic known to raise one from unconsciousness. There is nothing we can do. He will drink broth, if we pour it down his throat, but he does not awaken. There is nothing we can do.” Over and over. A litany, a chant, a curse.

Behind them, like the coming of the dawn, a light was growing, so bright it burned his eyes. How could they not notice this? How could the go on squabbling with each other when faced with such a thing?

Through their arguing, he heard the sound, building and building. A rushing, driving sound which seemed to swell until it was near unbearable, as if all of the voices in the world whispered at once. The light throbbed and pulse. Theroen wept. Fear, awe, confusion. Was this death, then? Perhaps his acceptance into heaven after his stay in grey purgatory?

Is that what you wish, then? It was all voices, no voices, a whisper on the wind, a chorus of screams. Theroen’s temples throbbed with it.

He tried to shake his head. No. No, this was not what he wanted. Death? He was nine years old. There was still so much to do, to explore, to see, to know.

You would live?

Thereon found he could answer the voice... could have spoken to it all along.

Yes. I would live. Until I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to my death, I would live.

So be it. Speak, Theroen. Call to them.

I cannot.

But he could, and did, opening his mouth, stretching his throat, peering desperate from his bed as the light and the noise receded.

“Mother...”

The word cut across the room, stopping his mother in mid-sentence. She turned, the doctor and nurse staring with frank disbelief. There were tears again, now, welling in his mother’s eyes, but not those of anger and frustration and sorrow shed just moments ago. Theroen sat up, blinked, tried his voice again. He looked his mother in her eyes, took in her joyful weeping with that same calm that would be with him for all his life. He spoke from his bed, spoke for the first time since the horse had hit him, spoke for the first time since he had descended into the depths of coma, five months before.

“Mother, I wish to go to church.”

* * *

“From that day forward, there was no question in my mind what I was meant to do. I was meant to live, yes, but more than that; I was meant to communicate what I had seen to others. I had been sent a vision from God. A reprieve from death. You ask how I