This is Not a Prayer and You Are Not a Saviour 

It isn’t called Black Mass because of the velvet curtains. Though they shimmer like the night sky in the steady flicker of the long-wicked red candles, shooting cavorting shadows onto the cool granite wall with each sweep of a cloaked body that passes.

It isn’t called Black Mass because of the obsidian robes, or because of the cool night sky that presses its sticky hands against the rusted windowpanes so urgently that they quiver within their frames with an icy screech. And yet all these things are that – blackness. Darkness. The embodiment of shadow pressed tightly between four demanding walls with stern, stony faces.

The old church was stripped of its livery, great stretches of fabrics adorned with deep reds and startling gold heaped unceremoniously into a corner and shoved behind a bench. Someone – a new arrival, perhaps - suggested burning it, but the idea bounced lamely across the walls before sinking into its own silent grave. No one was prepared to offend Our Master with such petty misuse of his flame. Despite the satisfaction that could be gained in watching the heavy fabric contort and melt and sizzle away.
But it is not for our satisfaction that we meet.

This is not like anything. It is not like a cult, or like a Ouija board held shakily in a teenage girl’s excited hands. It is not bedroom occultism, or kitchen witchcraft. This is not a jar of salt buried outside a scorned lover’s home, a hex washed away with a river, a crystal under the pillow. We are bound by our hands and feet with an invisible red string that pulls tightly at our skin, drawing soft tears of desperation-tinged crimson that spill down our ankles and wrists. I cannot say, for certain anymore, that I wouldn’t come if I didn’t have to be here. If my brain didn’t curl like worms trapped within my skull, writhing their excited dance of anticipation at the place I would inevitably end up. It’s almost like clockwork – the desperate wriggle of my grey matter as it crashes against the back of my skull, a dull headache that blinds my eyes and makes my mouth go dry in my waking hours. And then the nightmares; the stretched-out demonic faces, the spirals of teeth that fill my mouth and choke in my throat, the falling, falling, falling. And then the black, wax-sealed letter on my doorstep, summoning me to where I will always be.

A hand touches my arm through silken gloves, blowing my pensive thoughts like smoke from my eyes.  A soft face, too old for something like this. Smile lines from a life a million miles from here. I know her from somewhere (someone) I used to be – perhaps she was my teacher, or a friend of a friend. She seems to know me, but routine breeds familiarity. It breeds it like a virus, and I am sick, sick, sick.

              “Are you okay?” she asks. Her voice is too soft, too warm for the chill that’s sweeping under my crushed-velvet robe. I tug it closer to me, finding no comfort in its spiralling folds. My words escape me, stolen by the heavy, rich sandalwood incense smoke that slides its way down my throat and out my nose. I nod, allowing her to curl a hand under my arm as I am led across the dirt-flecked red carpet that’s rolled, without ceremony, between the decaying and moth-eaten pews. My eyes flash briefly on a rolled up hymn sheet, yellowing and cracked where it’s been shoved between cushions. I find no God there. There is none to be had anywhere here. The worms turn listlessly behind my eyes.

There are seats, but no one sits. They stand, cloaks swaying around ankles to give the appearance of floating off the ground, like a congregation of ghosts turned opaque by the pure want want need that rushes through their veins. I am led in a string of others just like myself in an odd disfigurement of a wedding march, failing to catch my peers’ eyes as they glance below the rim of their hoods.
And then I am before Him.

He is not a single being. He is a Baphomet statue that towers over my head, two fingers up, two pointing down at my feet. Nothing above, nothing below. His large marble face is pristine, polished right into the rings of the delicately arched nostrils. He is the only thing between the front door and the back that isn’t swarmed with maggots and rot and cold. Even the gently flickering flames are no match from the overbearing heat that radiates off His chalky skin, and the grooves of His sculpture that are so detailed and lifelike that my hand almost twitches to touch, expecting to feel the rustle of soft breath and moving fur. For He is not quite marble and stone. The eyes that stare out of His perfectly-crafted skull have been gouged from the face of a real beast, pressed into those blank sockets to gaze upon us. To judge us. To love us.
And at His own hooved feet, there He sits too. Now an old man, made of flesh and bone and violence and lust, lips worn back from callous laughter hacked up from shrunken lungs clogged with filth. His maw is loose, smeared with something grey that He cannot wipe away. Could not, I suspect, even if He were alive. His weathered hands, gnarled with blackened fingers that are still swollen with dead blood, are held up by two servants, two women sunk to their knees beside Him, gripping Him at the elbow to stop His limp arms from falling down. Or falling off.
In one hand precariously rests a small crystal decanter, filled to its brim with a deep liquid that appears like ink in the dim light, its swirling surface absorbing the meagre light offered by the candles that have now begun their steady drip of wax onto the floor. The other hand houses a plate, upon which rests several thin circles of (something that has been carefully crafted to look exactly like) wafer, each embossed with a sharp pentagram that burns the tongue as it’s laid against it. I watch the line before me shrink, each cloaked figure greedily accepting their cup, tongue lolling out as the wafer is placed upon its spit-drenched surface, sucked back with an obscenity that can only truly belong between these walls.
I keep my mind focused on the steadily rising chant of the people around me, the scattered Latin, twisted with sobbed English and the too-specific intonation of desperate prayer. Nobody, after all, began a sinner. Were we not all saved from Birth? Isn’t what they’ve always told us? I was brought up believing that the world could be mine if I wanted it badly enough, if I was kind enough, if I was good enough. But still, my world fell to disrepair. Over and over again. A broken arm as a child, a car crash as a teen. The failed marriage, the child I’d never have. Whoever died for me died for nothing at all, if such pain can exist in a world I was promised had been saved.

I sink before the corpse, politely swallowing down my disgust at His putrid, too-sweet scent, like a rotting apple exhuming its sickly stench into the air inches in front of my nose. The girl on His right urges a glass into my hand, and I drink eagerly. I pretend it’s wine, even as the thick liquid coats my teeth, the uneasy warmth coiling around the tongue I eagerly allow to lay flush against my chin, my eyes pleading as I gaze up to the other girl with the wafer pressed between two fingers. The burn comes a moment after contact, but the dizziness sweeps in as soon as I’ve raised myself back to my feet. Clumsily, stupid and already drunk with the potency of the (not wine) wine and the (not wafer) wafer, I find my way to a space between two identical cloaked figures that maybe I knew once. I don’t greet them, my eyes fixed on the still-wandering orbs jammed within the mighty head of the Baphomet statue.
 

There is a tight, oozing ball of rage curling inside my stomach, a lecherous tumour of my own devising, pressing against my flesh as it bubbles and twists. It microdoses me with a sliver of despair that climbs my spine, seeps its way into my throat. My head falls back as a howl rips through me, my teeth gnashing as my own cries and prayers and pleads join the congregation around me, our collective voice like nails tearing into the flesh of a lifetime of promises not met and deceptions once held dear.
We are not here to be saved. We are here for the truth, for the love of the knowledge that we have always, always been lied to, for the option to not believe and not have faith. There is no preacher here, no clergy to lead us away from the darkness and into a light that was only ever headlights streaming towards us down a one-way road.

The screams get louder as the candles get dimmer, crimson wax (not wax) beginning to splatter upon the sucked-in features of the corpse at our feet. His face contorts and disfigures as the light casts harsh shadows on his jagged bones, on his hollow eyes, the dehydrated tongue that is beginning to slip from between those lifeless, cracked lips. The girls beside him keep him upright even as they turn their attention away from him and towards the sky, their own roars of anger and fear seeping from their gaping mouths like black tar, bubbling as they spit their anger into the air.
We are a congregation, and we are screaming.
I am the congregation, and I am screaming, and sinning, and unsaved.