Once the silence took hold, there was no getting him back. They arrayed monks around the boy all the same: kneeling in a circle and repeating their chant. The circle was to both to push the silence out if they could and hold it within.
His mother said the last sound he ever made was a laugh like they chiming of a bell, so they drew smiling faces along his walls. The boy sat, and stared, and waited perhaps for whenever the lord of the quiet came back. His mother, privately, with tears in her eyes, did funeral rights in the wee hours of the morning.
His father, however, summoned more monks and more nuns and they painted the walls yellow and sang nursery rhymes that he was frankly far too old for. Outside the walls, the people tied evil eyes to the trees, some of which clinked together in the breeze like gnashing teeth. What would they do, if the silence came for their children next?
It was his nursemaid, sitting by his bed, who saw Benjamin last. His head was bowed and he was silhouetted by the light of the moon, glimmering like a bite along his spine. She loved him best, she thought, and knew the last thing he did was not laugh.
The lord of quiet seeped in from the shadow of the dark and the nursemaid forgot in the way of dreams, how to move. The lord was grand like an ocean is grand and faceless.
He bade the boy speak. Benjamin opened his mouth, a ripping tearing sound, for the first in a long time. The nursemaid felt her own mouth press shut, prickling at the edges like a sewing needle through skin. She felt it, as she went inside herself and closed the door.
What a wonderful man she thought and Benjamin tossed his own head back. He let out a howl, deep and winter-weathered, and spoke with that borrowed voice, wind and growls and gravel. The lord of quiet put out of his hand and he took it. They walked backward then, up and out, to the moon and where all creatures go to live when silence takes them.
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