Brendan knew death was a terrible thing, but he also knew it was part of life. He had learned that three years ago when the family dog Dasher had gotten sick and couldn’t walk anymore. They had taken him to the vet where the doctor injected the dog with something that made him sleep forever. Delaney cried. Brendan asked why Dasher had to die, couldn’t the doctor help him? Mom explained that all things died and it was okay to be sad but it was a natural part of life and we should be happy for all the memories we have of Dasher.
By the time the baby died, Brendan had read maybe 100 pages of the book. After the death, after the funeral with the tiny coffin, Brendan read the next fifty pages or so in a two-night sprint. The Romans believed in immortals. They knew that some people lived forever, if that person pleased the gods. A family that didn’t show the proper respect to the gods could be punished and punished repeatedly. And severely. None of his family had observed the sanctity of Saturday. Everyone slept late and then went off to do their own thing. Tyler drove somewhere, Delaney texted friends, his parents watched TV and cleaned the house, and even he went bowling in the youth league and then played arcade games with his friends. They enjoyed themselves because they thought it was the weekend, but they were wrong and the gods had made them suffer. Dasher had been a warning so many years ago. The baby was punishment. Brendan hadn’t wanted a little brother, but he also didn’t want his mother sleeping all day and staring into space like her brain was turned off when she occasionally managed to get up.
In light of the baby’s death, Brendan rose early on Saturdays, showered, put on clean clothes, and planned the sacrifices. Chapter two of Finding God was about sacrifices and was mostly boring, ironically enough—a lot of scholarly-sounding gibberish like from his history book or science text, but a few passages had been particularly intriguing. Brendan used a yellow highlighter to mark them and then stuck Post-It notes on those pages so he could turn to them immediately whenever he needed. He had been reading them over yesterday on the playground.
The passage on page 34 read: In order to appease the gods in times of hardship or win their support in times of ambiguity or simply maintain their blessings in times of prosperity, the Romans (and, presumably, the Greeks before them and the Mayans and Aztecs before them and the authentic primitives before them) staged often elaborate animal and—horrifying though it may be to us today—human sacrifices. These were conducted on ornate altars with priests and priestesses bedecked in glamourous gowns speckled with gold conducting these official rites from ancient texts, most of which are (sad to say) long lost through the chaos of time.
However, there is some record of how such sacrifices might have been carried out. After the traditional prayers and invocations of the gods, the animal (or human) was held down upon the stone altar (pictures depicting several people restraining another man—the sacrificed—on the altar are well-documented throughout many of these early “civilized” cultures) and the priest or, much more frequently, the priestess raised the chosen talisman in one hand and the Holy Blade in the other. A precise slice across the neck ended the life of the animal or human.* The blood was collected in a ritual bowl and then sanctified. The corpse was then eviscerated and the major organs removed. The priest or priestess then began the very important, and bizarre, practice of Haruspicy. This method of diving the future by examining the entrails of the dead will not be discussed here, but it should be noted that these ancient cultures believed this practice to be an authentic viewing portal into the future and the whim of the gods.
At the bottom of the page, the astrex from earlier was answered:
*Human sacrifices, as legend holds, often involved heart extraction, which will be discussed later on page 45.
Page 45 read:
The ancient practice of human-heart removal as a means of sacrifice to the gods is a legend of mythic proportions, but is not without its supporting evidence. Human sacrifices were not common, nor uncommon—they were reserved for only the most reverential of ceremonies, or the most dire. Almost without fail, a human was sacrificed when either plagues, famines, or wars besieged a society. When things were their gloomiest and most desperate, the Greeks and the Romans offered up one of their own to try to turn the tide of despair.
The chosen one, often a volunteer soldier willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to help his people and, ostensibly, earn a one-way ticket to Elysium, the blessed place for the honored dead, laid upon the altar and was held in place by other warriors and, much like the animal sacrifices described earlier, the priest or priestess invoked the gods and bestowed the final blessing rites. Using most likely talons (or metal spikes fastened to his/her fingers), the priest or priestess then pierced through the chest cavity and the breast plate to seize the heart. Once removed, the heart became the new consecrated talisman for future ceremonies.
The practice of human sacrifice is not purely confined to the ancient societies; even the Bible details various such ceremonies. The most famous is, of course, of Abraham and his son Isaac, whom God demanded be scarified as proof …
Brendan didn’t care about Abraham and Isaac—he cared about what he could do to protect his family from further punishments. Brendan wouldn’t—couldn’t—sacrifice an animal on some altar, or even the coffee table. He could certainly never remove a beating heart from someone’s chest, never mind that to perform it accurately, he’d need several helpers. He wasn’t a murderer: he only wanted to get the gods back on his side. So, he had to find alternatives.
He wrote them inside a marble composition book, like the one Miss Tuyol made him have for grammar exercises. He created the list while watching Saturday morning cartoons, so Dad wouldn’t get suspicious and ask him what he was doing. Dad probably thought he was writing some story about Bobo and BooBoo Bunny, who always had the bad luck to get their carrot supply stolen. The cartoon was mildly funny, similar to SpongeBob, but Brendan only watched parts of it, usually the segments where the bunnies found the carrot thief and concocted some way to punish him. The punishments were things that would kill someone in real life, though they only left the carrot thief dazed and apologetic.
Brendan hadn’t performed any of the sacrifices he’d written down (and always worried by Saturday’s sundown that he had angered the gods even further because he was too chicken to do what they wanted), but he felt things were getting better. Mom still slept most of the day and had that empty expression on her face when she did get up, but Dad had resumed making breakfast for everyone on Saturday and that was at least some recognition of the day’s importance. And nothing bad had happened to anyone in the family since Brendan had dedicated himself to their protection.
That, however, changed last night.
Brendan woke when Tyler came home from his date with some girl who Delaney said was a weirdo. Instead of going right to bed, Tyler called his friend Paul and told him something horrible had happened. Brendan had discovered a while ago that when Tyler wanted privacy on his cell phone and didn’t want to go outside and sit in his car to get it, he would sit in his closet instead. He must have figured that it was the safest way to prevent Mom and Dad from hearing through his bedroom door or Delaney from nosing in his business from her room which bordered the opposite wall. He probably assumed that Brendan was too busy playing with action figures to care about his big brother’s private conversations. Brendan did care. He had to—or else how would he know if the gods were pleased or not?