Lévesque

Priestess

By Gray Lévesque

In another age she might have been a priestess.

Castrated and smoke-fed, an oracle wreathed in fine cloth and hidden from the harsh brightness of the world that it would never blind her. Her voice could carry Orphic hymns to the hearts of cowherds, or grow hoarse from a vow of silence. She could have been a haruspex or a crocodile keeper, shedding blood in offer to the sacred. She ate the fantasy like liver, plump and cloyingly rich.

In another age she might have been a priestess, but in this life she worked at a warehouse.

They called it a regional distribution center, a single neuron in a colossal beast that sprawled across the entire continent, inexplicably not collapsing despite its weight. Synapses the size of semis barreled into the receptor, triggering hundreds of minimum wage neurotransmitters to break their bodies processing the signal, preparing to pass it along the chain before triggering a dozen other synapses to repeat the process endlessly. Her job primarily consisted of watching a sack fill, hefting it over her shoulder, and loading in a new sack before its absence could be noticed. It was a dull job, but she had never seen work as a path to fulfillment. That came through different means, and in that regard the work served her perfectly.

For so long, she had no name for it, but if pressed, she might simply call it the unreal: the moment when the actual and the impossible overlapped, when one became unmoored from reality and belief and disbelief became one.

Her journey began with childhood terrors, pranks played by her brothers when they hid with masks, turning the home that she knew to be full of people into a haunted wasteland, populated only by monsters. In those moments before the scare, the world twisted into a place where impossible became improbable, and the familiar the strange. And yet this new frontier proved frustratingly fragile: inevitably it would collapse with a growl and a shriek, and her life would return to a known quantity in an instant.

As she grew older, she sought it out every place she could. Her appetite for the horror grew voracious as she scoured dusty shops for forgotten books and old forums for urban legends. Whatever she found didn't need to be true, but it had to have potency: the organic, the ancient, the resurfaced. It didn't have to be good, but it had to feel right. A book out of print for decades, a tale half-remembered save the chill, the visions of basement-bound ascetics with aught save a mattress and a laptop. She hungered for the abandoned, the mythologized, the pale. She dreamed, as so many do, of stumbling onto a locus of unspeakable terrors.

Her research moved into the esoteric and to the indulgent at once. A serpentine Sabaoth offered her lysergic acid diethylamide, and Simon Magus baptized her in decoction of fly amanita. Heresies blended with hallucinogens, hits of cannabis coupled with cocktails of kava and emerald tablets whose origin escaped her. Among all these, nothing paired so well as Azoëtia by candlelight and the curling smoke of dimethyltryptamine: aatic seals thrumming with a forbidden malice that took on a life of its own in her state of ascension.

The highs and the hierophants brought a sense of wonder and exploration to her life, a world of knowledge unknowable save through experience, yet as it was above, so it was below. She might trade her newfound knowledge for very few things, but it could never compare to the derealization of the normal. The moment she grasped the aatic seal was the closest she might ever have come to truly witnessing her sublime unreal, were it not for the dream.

The dream came only once, then never again. It was a dream of hard, earnest work; the kind that made her shoulders board-stiff at the thought. Her charge is tough, raw and wet, though whether she is kneading or dyeing or carving she cannot tell—perhaps it is all at once. The dream lacks the lucidity of others, mere sensation and sound with little presence of mind. What the dream does not lack is a voice like fat spilling onto the fire, its words smelling of acrid smoke that flooded her lungs.

Her arms work and her eyes water, and tears stream down her cheeks. She is commanded, but she cannot understand. She is berated, and it cuts to her core. The voice multiplies once, twice, a thousand times, words overlapping until it becomes as static, the roar of it overtaking all else. When she sits up in bed moments later, she finds her nails bleeding.

The dream came only once, but the voice does not. It whispers in her ear during the night as she works, when she finds herself alone in the warehouse. Nominally a night shift, neither sun nor moon can find purchase in the face of an endless expanse of concrete. Were there a window, it couldn't be seen as the walls stretch beyond the limits of her sight. Her focus remains on the slowly filling sack and on nothing, a form of hypnosis as packages of all shapes drop irregularly into her charge.

An hour before break, the great machine to which she tends grinds to a halt, yet the susurrous sounds of its operations do not cease. The hiss of pneumatics, absent the hum of the belt, ring shrill enough to curl teeth. And yet, she realizes, it feels the same as the voice. She turns to find the other stations empty, her pulse jumping to her throat. An unknown force halfway between disbelief and dissociation propels her forward, and she finds herself wandering through mazes of machinery. Venturing further out to find the source of the noise, she expands her search. It leads her to a place she had never been before, among other machines of different colors, rising towards the ceiling in their majesty. Here, too, she finds herself alone, but these machines keep operating in their handlers' absence. The machines seem familiar, but she can't discern function from watching their operation alone. Her neck hairs stir, a tactile indicator of subconscious unease, but when she turns she sees nothing. The noise multiplies, a sharp and exponential increase in volume, and she cries out, alerting a nearby coworker.

The noise stops suddenly. All at once, the world returns to normal around her. Her coworkers must have just left the rest area, having taken their break early. The illusion of her momentary derealization has been shattered. Demoralized, she returns to her station. Machinery that had been halted begins its work again, and though it sings in the language of something greater than human, it is merely the song of the beast she serves.

The dream came only once, and the details faded fast. Very little remained in the minutes after waking, save for the barest minutiae and a lasting sense of longing. Even if she had perfectly recalled the language, she would never have been able to discern the words from one another. If she could simply remember, she could learn to listen. If she could learn to listen, she might hear it once more, and she would finally understand. And yet she struggles to remember, and struggles to listen, so she spurns the outside world with a pair of clay-colored ear plugs.

On a whim, she decides to catch the bus. The brakes do not squeal or the hinges creak, and the change does not rattle as it's dispensed. The window she sits next to appears to rattle in its frame as the bus resumes its journey, but it fails to make a sound. Through the dingy tint, the sun hangs low in the sky, either rising or setting above ten thousand people living lives that are utterly without noise. It is, she thinks, the most beautiful thing that she has ever seen.

The other people on the bus do not speak, though a few move their mouths as if they do. She watches their tongues flap and throats convulse in unexpected revulsion. Once, she loved watching people in their many eccentricities, but in this new, silent world, all she can feel is disgust. Her hand wanders to her own throat, wincing as her thumb grazes the pointed tip of her laryngeal prominence. She thinks then of the dream, a command and an admonishment, though their nature remains hazy. Watching the people around her speak, in this silent world, the gutteral undulations of human tongue turn her stomach. She retches, and as the hot trickle of bile and mucus drips from her lip, she feels as if a veil has lifted. Finally, she can hear the voice that she has been listening for all this time.

The dream came only once, and with it two instructions: Learn how to listen. Forget how to speak. Her fingers clench, digging for the secret. It's hard, earnest work, the kind that leaves her hand stiff from trying to wrest it free, and she finds it harder than expected to pull it out. She pulls with as much force as she can muster, and is utterly silent as she feels the cords slip free of her throat. In her hand is a quickly cooling lump of cartilage.

The people on the bus crowd around her, their faces mocking tableaus of real emotions: shock, horror, disgust. They are voiceless in their pantomime, but nonetheless she smiles. She can hear the voice once more, and though she still doesn't know the words, she is joyous. Two waxy trails of blood dry along the angles of her jaw.

The dream came only once, and it lasted for so long. She couldn't say if it had been days or weeks, but the sense of the passage of time was one of the few things she could recall. When she woke, it was the only thing of significance that remained from her dream.

She does not know how she arrives at work. Her shift is beginning, or perhaps ending, but when she arrives at the station she recognizes no one. She smiles, flinching slightly at the pain of her pierced eardrums, but it does not sour the mood. She should have known it was here, what she has sought for so long. The world is silent, but here in the throbbing neural cell, the warehouse swells with an unearthly chorus.

She alone can hear it, the voice that howls from the cracks in the world, and she weeps. Her tears flow freely in the face of the unknowable, the known, the beautiful and the terrible. How few among the untold billions have faced this and recognized it?

The voice does not speak words; it does not beckon to her. It is the voice of something large and old and primal, of pain and fear and rage. It is the death throes of a universe whose end is written in its birth. It is the sound of stars growing cold, of bright and living chaos returning to stiff, unfeeling order. And yet the voice is comforting, because to howl is to live. It is unfathomably beautiful, because its absence unthinkable. Now that she has heard it, she will forever worship it—has been worshipping it all her life, without knowing. In another age she might have been a priestess, but in this life she could become a prophet, mute and deaf to all save the subject of her eternal affections.

It is the quintessence of mystery.
It is the dirge of Orpheus.
It is the certain become the unknowable.
It is the unreal, and it is all she ever hoped it could be.

Gray Lévesque is a transfeminine writer, music producer, and game developer with an insatiable thirst for all things strange and surreal. When it is not working on one of its numerous projects, it spends its days in a Detroit apartment with its husband and a small striped cat. Information on its projects can be found on its Tumblr, wolfpaper.tumblr.com.