A Prayer for Which No Words Exist - part one

[image by Pulkit Kamal]

When I finished writing this in the fall of 2019 I had no idea what the hell to do with it. 

I sensed that it wasn’t publishable—or that I was very unlikely to be able to sell it—at least not in its draft form, but I had no idea how I could go about making it so without rewriting the entire thing. Which I didn’t want to do, because I actually kind of liked it as it was, or at least very nearly as it was. I felt like shopping it around to publishers would require dramatically changing it, and yet I wasn’t inclined to do so.

So for a year it gathered dust in my Scrivener app while I focused on other things. 

At some point I decided that I would probably self-publish it. I may still do that. But then I was seized with the inspiration to put it here, because why not? 

Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that, as I said, it’s very close to a raw draft. It’s messy and I suspect in a number of places it doesn’t easily make sense—although in fairness I intended the logic to be dreamy and not entirely coherent. What you see here is not the product of a process with an editor. I’ve done a couple of passes and made some minor edits, but the essential structure is as it was when I first finished it.

The second reason is that it’s messed up as hell. I will be including AO3 tags below; please read them carefully. One of the things I did when I started to write it was purposefully allow my id out to play without worrying much about self-censoring. 

But if you proceed knowing those two things, I’m guessing you won’t judge me too harshly. Hell, maybe you’ll even like it. 

A couple notes on inspiration: heavy amounts of it has been drawn from the film A Dark Song, which is weird and off-kilter and disturbing and I recommend it if you’re into that kind of thing. The other is specifically related to one scene, and the debt owed in that case is to K.M. Szpara, who dared me to write tentacle sex. 

AO3 tags: smut, angst, sorta slow burn, disturbing images, very VERY dubious consent, sex magic, heavy BDSM, bondage, knifeplay, impact play, sensory deprivation, humiliation, suicidal thoughts, trauma, hurt/comfort except not, ill-advised journeys to the Otherworld, eldritch horrors, tentacle sex, probably other tags that I’m not thinking of right now. 

I’ll post the first two parts of this unlocked; the rest will be locked to supporters. This whole thing is the length of a short novel so there should be several parts.

Hope you enjoy.

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.

— Richard Siken, “You Are Jeff”

0

This is what you wanted, says the voice. This has always been what you wanted. Look.

He looks. He can't see. He can't see anything; the darkness is a solid thing. He blinks and struggles to adjust, but he senses somehow that adjustment is something he's already achieved in every possible way and there's nowhere else to go. If it was possible for him to see, he would be seeing.

Exactly.

Hands. On his face, his bare shoulders, his bare chest. There is pain, not sharp but deep like the rumble of an earthquake, like thunder in his bones. It's familiar, this pain. It is in its own way a comfortable thing. The hands travel over him, flaring the pain wherever they touch him, and the hands are also familiar, and they're more than comfortable; he realizes that he aches for them with a pain wholly separate from the one surging slowly along the pathways of his nerves.

Hard cold beneath his feet. Beneath his knees. He's walking. He's crawling. Fingers through his hair and a puff of breath against his ear, and the breath is cool like a breeze easing through a shallow cave, and without any discernible scent.

You came back to me. I knew you would.

In the way of dreams, he asks for no clarification.

Those fingers return to his face. He moves his lips when the tips of the fingers press against them and that movement becomes a kiss and the breath becomes a sigh. Will you stay? You don't have to stay, you know. Except what he knows is that this may not be true. The voice is not quite lying. It's not that simple.

God, touch me. Please keep touching me, he whispers, please.

God. Yes. Laugh. All right, then. The floor turns over and vanishes and he tumbles. Solidity under his feet again even through the spin. Blinking as the light strokes over his eyes the way the fingertips traced the seam of his mouth. He licks his lips and tastes salt. The light is from the street outside; the blinds are open. He's standing and he turns and walks, naked, into the hallway toward the kitchen, and he thinks that he's been naked for a long time and this too is comfortable, only the comfort has vanished with the pain and he misses both.

He is not afraid. This is also novel.

The kitchen gleams. The light is different and it makes him think of polished bones. The tile, the stainless steel and chrome, the knives in the drainer blade-up; he always places them that way and always, always, murmur the shadows, you imagine what it would be like to trip and fall and feel the point of one enter your throat and scrape against your spine on the way out the other side.

A shadow sitting at the breakfast table. It turns as he enters, only it was always facing him. In the darkness of it, something else gleams. It extends a hand and he drops to his knees and the knife is in his grip.

You don't need that. You don't need to be afraid of it anymore. You know this. Will you stay?

The knife skitters across the floor. He bows his head. The hands close over him like a blessing. The bone light bleeds away.

Will you stay?

Is there somewhere else to go?

1

“No names,” says the dark-haired man over his water glass.

The man seated across from him toys with his own glass, running his fingertips through the condensation. It occurs to him, as he watches the other man’s strong throat work through the swallows, that this probably looks like a date, which he isn't as uncomfortable with as he might have expected. This isn't an especially romantic dinner spot, a casual and vaguely Italian establishment filling up with the early dinner crowd. Was the waiter looking at the two of them that way? In his experience waitstaff affect a carefully neutral attitude where this kind of thing is concerned but he also knows that you look at people on a date in a different way from other couples who appear to merely be friends.

He should address what's just been said, because it's strange, although it's a repetition of what the email listed, among a few other conditions and a physical description. He focuses and cocks his head. Stop staring at him, you're making this look even more like what it already looks like.

“I was meaning to ask you about that. Why no names?”

“Because,” says the man, setting his glass down. His eyes are both large and sharp, and also very black. He appears to be missing his irises. It's perhaps not as unsettling as it should be. “They don't matter. Where we’ll go, they'll matter even less.” The corner of his thin mouth curls. “It'll be only you and me. Why would we need names?”

“Why can't we use them until then?”

“It's less for you to forget. You'll have to shed enough as it is. Anyway, it's better if I don't know either.”

This is strange, he thinks, but given what he asked for in the ad, he shouldn't really expect anything else. Although he's not certain what he did expect. A cape? Some kind of goth getup? This man is not in any respect extra. He's simple and plain in a neat pair of black slacks and an equally neat gray tee. He wears no rings etched with occult symbols. He wears no jewelry at all. There is nothing about him that signals shaman or spiritualist or any of the other terms that might have applied.

He smiles. It's a cautious smile. He must be obviously bemused. Just then the wine arrives and he finds that he welcomes the distraction as the glasses are filled with a red the specific variety of which he can't remember. The waiter assures them that their appetizers are on the way and vanishes. He stares into the depths of the red.

“So that's part of the ritual, then?”

The man across from him pauses in the act of lifting his glass to his mouth. “Are we beginning?”

“I don't know, I'm not sure I've decided.”

“Yes, you have. You wouldn't have agreed to meet if you hadn't.”

He frowns slightly. “Do you think making assumptions is attractive?”

The man shrugs. “Tell me no, then. Dismiss me.”

Of course he doesn't dismiss him. He drinks wine in silence for a moment or two and then tells himself to slow down. He should be as sober for this as possible. Perhaps he shouldn't have ordered the wine.

Did he order the wine? Was it the other man? He genuinely can't recall.

“Why do you want to do this?”

He blinks, faintly startled. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. It's a pretty basic question, wouldn't you say? For this kind of ask?” The man raises a single long finger from the others curled around the bowl of his glass and points it. “What I'm going to be putting you through… You should know why you're doing it.”

“I do know why.”

The man arches an eyebrow. “Do you, now?”

Impatience. Why isn't he dismissing him? Does he really want to expose himself to this kind of arrogance for however long the process will take? “What, you want me to tell you?”

“I don't need to know. You do, though.”

His jaw clenches. “I know why I want to do it.”

“Well.” The man takes another swallow of wine. “We’ll see. Won't we?”

“So we really can't use names?”

“I told you, we don't need them.” The man sets his glass down, points again. “You're the seeker.” Points at himself. “I'm the guide. The roles are what matter. What we do matters. The reason behind what you're doing, they can remain your own. But there will come a point, maybe not very far in, where your reason will be all you have to hold onto, and in that moment you'll need to remember it and you'll need it to be clear. Do you understand?”

No. He nods.

“Good.”

The appetizers arrive. He pokes at his—fried calamari. The breading flakes away just a bit too easily.

“So it's going to be unpleasant?”

“Extremely,” the man says around a mouthful of portobello mushroom. “Mystics, yogis, ascetics of all kinds since the beginning of asceticism, they go through ordeals to achieve what they have. What you're asking for is even more than that.” His black eyes seem to flicker. “Isn't it.”

Not a question. Fair.

“Will it be dangerous?”

The man gives him a look that implies this is a very stupid question. “You want to travel alive to where most people only go when they're dead, of course it will.” He pauses, his gaze unwavering. “You have until the end of this meal to tell me no.”

Huff. “You're a pushy asshole, you know that?”

“I do. I'm going to have to be. You don't do what I'm going to have to do if you're a nice person, if you’re concerned for the feelings of others.”

“So what exactly are you going to have to do?”

What the man’s face does might or might not be a smile; in either case it's unsettling.

“I'm going to destroy you.”

2

The seeker spends a long time trying to decide who he should tell. If there's anyone to tell.

He is not an unreasonable man. Nor is he an uncautious one as a rule. He understands perfectly well how stupid, on paper, what he intends to do must be. You're supposed to tell someone where you'll be going, who you'll be with, how long you’ll be gone, at what point one should assume a bad if not worst case scenario and accordingly contact the appropriate authorities.

He's seen a movie or two. This is the setup for a situation where he ends up hanging from a meathook by his Achilles tendons.

But he wanders around his apartment for a while, restless and uncertain what to do with his body. With his hands. Uncertainty is emotion which is embodied; it doesn't remain confined to the interior but invades the nerves and muscles. He's overwhelmed by the sense that he should be doing something to prepare for this in a manner that involves someone else.

He wanders around the small part of the world he's designated for himself and in which he lives alone, surveying sparse furnishings, blankly unadorned walls. For the first time he perceives the impersonal nature of the place. It’s neat and not unattractive but that's precisely the problem; it feels as if it's been assembled for a catalog or a showroom, not for human occupancy. This troubles him. He's lived here for almost five years. There should be some mark of himself, some expression of his mind and personality on the objects he's accumulated and arranged, but all he can find is an unmade bed, a towel hanging up to dry in the bathroom, dishes in the drainer and a couple of dirty ones in the sink. There are clothes in the closet and dresser but he feels no particular attachment even to them. They're as nondescript as anything else here.

This feeling of disassociation is new to him and he doesn't like it.

He stops wandering the apartment and wanders his social media profiles instead. Every account he has is used only every other day or so, he doesn't have many followers and he doesn't know them well, the ones he knows at all. A few friends from school but he doubts he could properly call them friends anymore.

His parents don’t exist. He has no siblings. Somewhere in another closet he probably has pictures of his minimal extended family but if asked by a police sketch artist to describe any of them he's not sure he could summon up enough detailed recollection to be useful.

Should he tell someone? What about how long this nameless faceless person should wait before they sent someone else looking for him? In his discussion with the guide, no specific timeframe was ever settled on. The guide waved away his attempts to nail one down.

Work does know, after a fashion. He has nearly a month of leave accumulated. He's taken it. Surely this won't last for more than that. If it turns out that it does, he can contact them and let them know that he'll unavoidably be out of town for a bit longer. No one is likely to care.

No one is likely to care.

He packs. What to bring for an unspecified length of time, for a process he knows nothing about other than that he can expect it to be unpleasant? Pack light, he was told. Clothes? You won't need many. A couple of days’ worth. Whatever. Toiletries? A toothbrush. A razor if you like. Don't worry about anything else.

Phone? The guide smiled at that. Well, I won't tell you not to bring it.

He elects to leave the phone.

He puts these things into an overnight bag, along with a travel set of shampoo and soap. He puzzles over what he might be forgetting. There must be something else. It can't be this simple. He's taken trips before. Not many, for various reasons, and none in a long time, but he knows he packed more than this, even for a couple of days.

He can't think of anything else.

Gathering up his toothbrush and razor, he pauses and stares at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He stares for a while. He is beginning to feel like a stranger in his own home; now he looks at his straight nose and his high brow and his short straw-blond hair and his full lips and his mildly defined cheekbones and none of those pieces seem to entirely fit together as a whole. His face is disjointed, disharmonious. Something is wrong.

It's evening and the bathroom light is dim. The shadows in the corners are creeping up the walls.

Who are you? he thinks.

Just who the fuck are you, anyway?

3

This might be the most suicidally stupid thing: regarding this unspecified length of time, he doesn't know where he’ll be during its course.

Morning arrives gray and anemic and he drives. To the nondescript parking lot of a nondescript grocery store in a nondescript part of town, where the guide is standing near the grocery carts as if he's come to pick one up and decided better of it, a brown suitcase of medium size in his hand.

The seeker pops the trunk and unlocks the passenger door. But the guide tosses the suitcase inside, then walks around to the driver’s side door and leans over as the seeker rolls down the window.

“I'll drive.”

The seeker is about to protest. Then it hits him that he has no idea where they'll be going. It freshly comes to him seconds later, how strange and vaguely alarming this fact is. He makes no move to climb out. The guide fixes him with that hard black gaze.

“I'd rather you just tell me where we’re headed.”

“I'll drive,” the guide says again, patiently, and offers nothing else.

Very briefly, the seeker considers the merits of arguing this point. In another bout of that odd dissociation, he observes them from the perspective of a passing shopper, the physical arrangement of this conversation, and while it really shouldn't stand out as all that unusual, a wave of self-consciousness sweeps through him. It's as if he is somehow signaling to the world in general what he plans to do, what he plans to give himself up to, and he fears their judgment. He's annoyed with himself for this. He shouldn't care. This is not his regular grocery store. He doesn't know these people, recognizes none of them as they pass the car with their carts and carry handfuls of bags to their cars. It's likely that he’ll never see any of them again.

The guide is waiting, silent, his face impassive.

The seeker gets out of the car. The guide takes his place behind the wheel. The seeker climbs into the passenger’s seat and watches the guide, anticipating that he’ll pull out a cell phone and enter an address into the map app. He doesn't. He shifts the car out of park and swings out of the lot and onto the highway. He drives the car with an air of smooth familiarity, as if he's owned it for years. The seeker settles back and looks out the window as strip malls and auto dealerships slide by. He only half sees them.

He feels deeply that he is now committed to this, that there is no going back. It's reasonable to think this way. This man, whose name he does not know, is conveying him out of town to parts unknown, for a length of time he isn't sure of, and has explicitly said that he intends to destroy him.

As they enter the outskirts and the buildings thin out, the seeker imagines wrenching the door open and tumbling out onto the road, rolling into the grass at the shoulder. How much damage he might do to himself. Whether he could get up and run fast enough to escape this man, who will almost certainly double back and come to retrieve him. Because in this narrative he is a crazed killer, and that's what crazed killers do.

The green blurs. The gray sky lightens. Houses fall away into wide stretches of field. The guide says nothing. The seeker remembers a story he read once—apparently a true one—about two men who found that they shared a certain peculiarity and that they were an eerily perfect match. That they met, that one cut off and attempted to eat the other’s penis while he was still alive, that they both attempted to do so, that they failed, that the one then killed the other and ate a great deal of him before he was discovered.

The seeker recalls that he felt unexpectedly ambivalent about the whole thing when he read the story. What happened between them was horrific, disgusting—and arguably consensual. Did that make a difference? Did it matter? Was it even possible at all to consent to such a thing?

He felt a sadness that he couldn't quite explain. It took him until the day after to comprehend the source of the sadness: that for the man who was killed, who in the most meaningful way wanted so much to live—and die in—his ultimate fantasy, it seemed that it hadn't gone the way he wanted.

With something like that, you don’t get an opportunity to learn from your mistakes. You don’t get a second chance to make it perfect.

4

The weight in his hand is the most real thing. The cool slickness is comes in at second but the weight is the first and greatest and most lasting. The world is nothing but those things, a singular point that is the weight. Hold it, he says to himself. Feel it, he says to himself. This is real, he says to himself, this is all that's real because this will be the last thing and the only thing, this is the most powerful thing you have ever touched and it will be the most powerful thing you ever do.

This is the most real thing but it might not have been real, or it might not be real, or he will consider the possibility over and over and it might never be real—but the weight is there; he knows this because he carries it with him, a cold ball of lead in his chest. When you take a ball of metal and you heat it until it glows and you place it on a block of ice the ice screams as the ball sinks into it, and it sinks and sinks, boring its way in with the piercing and undeniable reality of itself.

He holds it and he is locked inside his head and the coolness is the coldness and all through him; it spreads and makes his muscles rigid, the weight in his lungs stilling them, his heart racing to get away. He understands that this is terror. Terror is the weight. Terror is what he carries with him everywhere.

A line of a poem; he can't remember the poem but he remembers the line. What will it be like, stepping into that cottage of darkness? The poem was a peaceful thing, he's almost sure of it, but he also recalls that he recoiled from it because it was a lie, and he walked away from it with the same terror he carried with him everywhere. He holds the gun and he thinks of standing on a high ledge and staring down at the world below, once more nothing real but the point at which the solidity beneath his feet and the air meet and join. He thinks that the true reason people are afraid of places like this is not that they might fall but that they might jump.

He can't move or breathe for the fear. The weakness is despicable. He howls silently against it. He wants to do it because he knows he can't do it. He wants to prove something to himself. He doesn't know what he wants.

What will it be like, that cottage of darkness? What's waiting for him inside?

He is already in the dark. The dark is terrifying. He can't decide, now, which is the more terrifying prospect: that inside that cottage he will be alone, or that he won't be alone at all.

The weight is real. He is not. Not yet. He is too afraid to become real.

Part of him will never escape from this moment. He is twelve years old.

5

“We’re almost there.”

Something prods his thigh and he jerks, gasps, blinks stupidly at the vision coalescing before his eyes. The green has spread and swallowed everything; he leans forward and peers upward through the windshield and the sky is barely visible. What he can see is still nothing but washed-out gray; the light here beneath the canopy of leaves and boughs is flat, as if he's moving through a still image.

He might be certain that he's never been here before. But whether it's the light or some other variable in play, everything appears so utterly plain that it could frankly be anywhere, so he can be nothing of the kind. This place does feel weirdly familiar. He tries to feel through it as he watches it pass them, blearily searching his memory as he does so for any touchstone between the two and finding nothing.

The road is little more than gravel. The vegetation threatens to overgrow it. This doesn't appear to be a way people frequently pass. Only through the blur of trees shadows seem to dance and flit, and as he turns and attempts to focus, one of them appears to detach itself and come toward them. Rushing. Tumbling.

They pass and it’s gone.

Where is there, he's about to ask, and then abruptly the trees fall away and the road opens into a small clearing paved with the same slate-gray gravel, and at its edge sits the cabin.

The car pulls to a sharp stop in front of it. The guide cuts the engine and without a word he gets out. The seeker stares after him for a moment as he rounds the car and heads for the cabin and climbs the two steps up to the narrow porch, pulling what looks like a key out of his pocket as he reaches the door.

The seeker hasn't been ordered to follow. At first he doesn't. Then as the guide fumbles with the lock, appearing to be encountering some difficulty, the seeker steps out of the car and leans for a moment on the open door, scanning what must be their destination.

The clearing is featureless. The cabin is unpainted and old but in decent condition, the kind of standard cabin any vacationer might rent; it doesn't at all resemble the decaying shack of a backwoods horror film murderer.

The seeker shuts the car door and goes to join the guide, who has finally gotten the door unlocked. The wind hisses through the trees, cool and slightly damp, smelling of wet soil. There is a name for the pleasant scent of rain, and after a few seconds he hits on it: petrichor. The word is drawn from the term for the blood of Greek gods. The smell of blood, he muses as he steps into the cabin. Not death but blood. It falls from the sky and flows into the veins of the ground, as if pulled by an immense and hidden heart. He doesn't know why this should be significant but the word echoes in his mind like a song.

The interior of the cabin is dim but his eyes adjust rapidly. The guide has gone ahead of him and left the main room, vanished through a doorway on the right. The sound of cabinets opening, closing, a rustle. The seeker looks around: the decor is very sparse, unlived-in, only a wood stove with a pile of logs and an old sofa near it, a coffee table and a rocking chair, a small wooden dining table and two chairs near a set of windows, a side table at the opposite end of the room beneath another set. There is nothing on the tables. There is no rug, there are no curtains. The short stub of a hallway in front of him looks as if it must lead to bedrooms. A bathroom, hopefully; the seeker does not demand luxury but would prefer to not have to rely on an outhouse.

The guide reappears. He's carrying a stack of dark cloth on his arms, on top of which rests a hammer and a box of nails. As the seeker puzzles over this, the guide proffers the stack.

“Help me nail them up.”

“Nail what up? Over what?”

“The windows,” the guide says. No trace of impatience. “We need to cover the windows.”

The seeker frowns. “Why?”

“Because there can't be any light. Not from outside.”

“But why?”

“Because I say so,” the guide replies. There is still no impatience to be heard in his tone. Only a perfectly level flatness. “I'll tell you more about how things are going to go when we’re done, but let's start with this now—if you really want this to work, you’ll do what I tell you. Whatever I tell you. It doesn’t matter whether or not you understand. It doesn't matter whether or not you want to. It doesn't matter whether or not you find it frightening, or painful, or revolting. I say, you do, and you don't question, and you don't hesitate.” He pauses, his eyes moving over the seeker’s face. The blackness in their centers seems to be bleeding into the sclera. “Say yes if you agree.”

The seeker simply looks at him. A cold weight is making itself felt low in his belly. He knows this weight. He despises it. He had hoped very much not to encounter it here.

It doesn't matter whether or not you find it frightening.

“What if I don't agree?”

The guide lifts his chin at the door. “Your car is outside.”

“I won't pay you.”

“Of course you won't, I won't have done anything. So make up your mind.”

For another long moment the seeker is silent. Suddenly the trope-stuffed film reel in his mind starts up again and in full vivid color much richer than what's actually in front of his eyes he sees himself as he turns and starts toward the door and the guide drops the stack of cloth and clubs him over the back of the head with the hammer. He sees himself fall like a sack of rocks. He sees the guide grasp him by the ankles and drag him into the hall, down to the cellar stocked with torture devices which is no doubt waiting for him.

Fear of that is not why he licks his lips and says, very softly, “Yes.”

It's only after they've nailed up the second cloth that he realizes that all this time, the guide has had his keys.