Page 4 of The Secret Shape of Worship
Despite (or possibly because of) Devon’s warning, Mina trailed even farther behind. He could just barely decipher the waning echoes of Dr. Cornelius’s inane lecture as the group pulled ahead.
“The ancient Egyptians had rejected the truth of the Hebrew God in favor of their own polytheistic, heathen idolatry. In fact, as the…”
Heat rose up in Mina’s cheeks. The irony and hypocrisy and audacity of this man coming to this place and belittling an entire culture of people for their belief in their gods when he literally handed out doctoral diplomas to students after teaching them the hermeneutics and exegesis of passages depicting magical talking serpents and animals walking two by two into a big boat.
Mina slowed his pace even more, kicking a loose piece of limestone and letting the group disappear into the dark distance, leaving behind a deep, almost thrumming quiet. The kind of quiet you can’t find almost anywhere else. No voices, cars, nothing electric or motorized. Just the deep, cold silence of stones.
Now that he was alone, Mina allowed his eyes to break their concentration on the cracks in the floor and drift back towardthe art that lined the walls. Chiseled bodies adorned in beautiful shades of emerald and lapis and gold.
As he reached a fork in the path, Mina stopped, unsure which way to go. He inspected the path to the left. It was wider, and the limestone dust on the ground seemed to have been recently disturbed. Whereas the path on the right was smaller, more dimly lit, and covered in a soft carpet of dust and tiny fragments of rock.
But just as Mina was about to turn left, an illustration on the wall to his right caught his eye. A huge form, bigger than any he’d come across yet, loomed over the other figures that surrounded it. Skin dark as a starless night. A thickly muscled figure with the head of a jackal. Fingers that stretched long and pointed and feet that haunched, angled and canine. While most Egyptian depictions of the male form tended to be simple, special attention had been paid to this illustration to emphasize the size and power of this god.
Anubis. Son of Osiris and shepherd of souls to the underworld.
In the scene before him, the god stood before a set of giant scales—one side holding a feather and the other holding the heart of a man, weighing it to determine how the man would spend his afterlife.Paradise or abyss.Visions of lakes of fire from the passages he studied in church since he was a child filled Mina’s mind. The eternal damnation that he’d been taught to fear since he first learned that one day he would die.
Mina shook his head to jostle the thought loose and instead took in the hulking form of the jackal god, a different kind of chill rippling across his skin. He wet his lips and let his eyes linger on the wide chest that tapered down to a slim waist and sharp V lines ending in a black, skirt-like covering.
Peering down the narrow fork that veered right, Mina saw more depictions of the dark god continuing down the passage. Something bloomed in his belly.
A blackhole.
A hungry, needful thing.
A warm draft brushed his face and nudged a thick, blond ringlet across his forehead. In the air, a scent of clove and wood smoke made him feel heady, and his eyes fluttered.
Without knowing why or that he’d even decided to do so, Mina turned right.
Scene after scenealong the darkening corridor depicted Anubis in various aspects of his duties. Weighing the hearts of men. Casting them into the abyss or ushering them safely to the underworld. In one, he seemed to be showing a group of mortal men, half his size, the art of mummification. In the next, a man knelt before him, prostrate, head and hands flat on the ground in total supplication.
Memories of growing up in his father’s congregation flashed through his mind. Rows and rows of sheep following one another, hands in the air and heads dipped low in painful piety, eyes squeezed shut to hold in the faintly conjured wisps of Holy Ghost. Mina watched it all like an unrehearsed circus performance. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to worship, but the mechanics of it felt so strange and foreign. Like a language he’d never learned. And the couple times he had closed his eyes and sang or prayed aloud or raised his hands with the others, his cheeks had caught fire, and he quickly stuffed his hands backinto his pockets. Like God could see his doubt and might send down a holy fire to ignite only him.
And yet…
There was something different in these depictions. In every scene, Anubis had a hand on the men before him. On their shoulder. On their face. Anubis the helper. The guide. The god that Mina studied and sometimes pretended to worship had never reached out for him like that. He’d never heard an answered prayer or gotten any sign when asking for help or comfort in his darkest moments. Never felt anything. Mina wondered what it would be like to experience a higher power that reached out to touch him.
As the scenes continued, the figures of Anubis grew larger and more numerous. Men bowing before the powerful deity, arms spread, faces low, the giant god looming above them with blazing eyes and huge muscles. But always a gentle hand. Mina wondered what it would be like to be in the presence of such power. To feel that hand on the back of his head. The stiffness in his pants began to return. Mina wondered if gods felt sexual desire. And if so, did they fulfill that desire with fellow gods? With mortals? Certainly not with mortals. The size difference alone would be enough to send a mortal to the afterlife. Mina throbbed at the thought.
“Jesus,” he said again, and grabbed at the silver cross around his neck, a half-hearted gift from his father upon learning Mina would be entering the seminary. He tucked the silver chain into his shirt with one hand, and with the other, he reached into his pants.
The hungry thing in his belly groaned with want. It was a foreign feeling. Mina had never been a creature of want; he’d always been a creature of musts. His studies, his family, his obligations to his church. So, he hardly ever touched himself. Not even in secret moments back home. But there wassomething different about this place. These quiet tunnels. Some primordial darkness that permitted the impermissible. That closed a blind eye to lustful desires and dark secrets. Where sin was a foreign word. A heady scent upon the air pulled at the thing growing deep down inside of Mina. The black constellation below his waistband tingled.
He touched the figure of the man on the wall. The one kneeling and prostrate before the giant figure of the jackal god. He imagined the man’s dark skin paling to a marble white, the hair growing and curling to a golden blond. Mina imagined himself. A surge of electricity shot through his fingers at touching something so priceless it should probably be behind glass. Reckless and without his normal hesitation, he grabbed his throbbing cock in his pants and squeezed. A wave of pleasure threatened to buckle his knees. His pants were too tight to comfortably contain both his fist and his engorged cock, so he unzipped them and let them hang loose around his slim hips, fully exposing himself to the darkness of the tomb. The cool air welcomed his warmth, and he grew even harder. Slowly, he began to move his hand down the length of himself. Dry and sticky from sweat, Mina spat in his hand, and his eyes rolled back as he stroked his now slick length, lusting hungrily after the god of the afterlife.
A cloud of shame tried to conjure itself above him, but it was weak. Insubstantial. Nothing like what he used to feel back home in the rare moments of release beneath the cover of night and heavy blankets in his bed. Nothing like the celestial eyes he always felt on him. Reading his thoughts. Marking his sins down to be recounted on the day of judgment.
You shouldn’t be doing this,he told himself.This is so wrong.But was it? He wondered what Anubis himself would think.Where had that thought come from?
The tentative wisps of shame were gone, and all that was left was Mina and the darkness and the jackal god. Mina stroked harder. Faster. He leaned back, the cool stone pressing against his exposed backside, sending another chill across his already electrified skin. A soft whimper escaped his throat. Mina was writhing in a dark cavern of pleasure. The deep roots of want pushed into his extremities, stretching out his skin until all the misshapen parts were laid bare for the darkness and only the darkness to see. In this black and blissful moment, Mina no longer fit the shapes he was always trying to stuff himself into. Star student, worthy son, godly servant. In this moment, he was only this. Pleasure and want.
As his balls began to tighten, Mina felt the orgasm gather itself.Oh no.He didn’t mean to let it get this far, but the climax was unstoppable at this point. Where should he finish? He didn’t want to stain his clothes. At the last second, a terrible, irresistible idea came to him. He stepped up to the wall and, with a spasm of pleasure, let his lust erupt directly onto the feet of the painted depiction of Anubis. An ancient, priceless work of art, and Mina had painted over it with his come. The awful desecration thrilled him, pushing wave after wave from his throbbing cock onto the wall, running down the long, black feet of the jackal god.
A rumble, deep below, as the final spasm left Mina breathless and clutching the wall and chest of the painting. An earthquake? Disheveled, Mina tucked himself back into his pants and prepared to make his way back to the main path. But as he turned left to go back the way he came, instead of a long tunnel, he found a solid wall.
What?He must have gotten disoriented and turned the wrong way. Though he didn’t remember having come to a dead end when he’d stopped in this spot. In fact, he was almost certain the path had continued further ahead. Though maybeall the blood throbbing through his penis had confused his perception, and he’d been wrong. Mina turned and walked the opposite way.
The images on the wall, though similar to the ones he’d seen walking down, didn’t seem to be the same. Had he been that distracted? And why did it seem like he was walking downward, deeper into the structure? In fact, the farther Mina walked, the steeper the path became. This was wrong. He would have remembered walking steeply uphill on his original detour. Just as Mina was considering turning back around, another rumble, closer this time, shook the ground beneath his feet. Mina reached to steady himself on the wall and smashed his fingers against the rough stone. The wall felt closer than it should have. Mina looked left and then right.No.The walls were definitely closer together than they’d been before. A deeper, more violent rumble. Mina actually felt the walls inch closer. This time, the rumble didn’t stop, and neither did the movement of the walls. The tomb was changing around him. Closing in. He was going to be crushed.
