Demons Never Lie by Brian Hesse (classic books for 7th graders TXT) 📕

Three centuries before a young carpenter was sacrificed on a splintery cross, giving birth to a new age of Christianity, fires raged among the Emerald hills of Ireland. Celtic bands gathered under the guidance of Druid priests to open the portal that separates the living and the dead. For the dead are sometimes trapped in a cold and dark limbo and view the living with envious eyes for the warmth their living beating hearts generate. They watch with sadness as the living enjoy the love, passions, and even the sorrows, they can no longer experience in their two-dimensional world of grey colorless landscapes. In the world of the dead, those not ready to return to their Mother, the stars, live in a world of perpetual loneliness. Lonely for the touch of the loved ones left behind on the other side of a very thin barrier separating two parallel dimensions.

At least, this is what many people still believe. This is very similar to what the ancient Druids believed. So, as crops would mysteriously fail to produce lifesaving grains, as animals would die from mysterious disease, and as people would succumb to unexplained illness, the dead were blamed for spreading such mischief fueled by their only real remaining emotion, envy.

So, it should be no surprise to the so called “modern” person today, that on the thirty first day of what we now call October, in the year 65 B.C.E., the lush green hills, of what we now know as Ireland, turned red with the blood of willing, and unwilling, human sacrifice.

The Druid priest would chant, “This night, we celebrate the festival of Samhain. This night, we spend with our loved ones who have not yet passed the final barriers to the bright lights in the sky. May this sacrifice bring forth the dead for one night, and release them from their dark prison,”  

For an entire night under a bright glowing moon, occasionally stained with blotches of red, the sacrifice victims entered the sacred circle, bordered by six-foot-high stone blocks. The sacred circle is a ditch just one foot deep with a radius of 10.79 feet or, a diameter of 21.59 feet. This is an important observation to keep in mind since the actual radius of the moon is approximately 1,079 miles or, a diameter of 2,159 miles. How, the ancients could measure such distances, and form a circle in such an exact ratio, is a mystery for the ages. The stone monoliths that border the outside of the circle are fifteen in number, and correspond to a specific spirit, thought to influence the daily lives of the people. A God of the Sun, the moon, the earth, the air, the water, etc. In the middle of the circle stands a Druid priests behind a flat and polished alter, giving thanks and praise to the God’s as he plunges his sacrificial dagger, made of sharpened flint, deep into the chest cavity of the helpless victim. The participants of the event, those asking for the return of the dead, chant sacred incantations in some strange hypnotized state as the victim’s blood is gathered into a large clay bowl under the stone alter. The sacred circle is ingeniously positioned on such a slight angle to allow gravity to force the blood to travel through a clay pipe leading to the one-foot ditch, which as already stated, made up the 10-foot radius circle itself. Throughout the night, the sick, elderly, criminals, and those just volunteering to die, take their place on the cold polished alter, as their blood slowly fills up the sacred circle. The sacrifices will continue until the circle is filled and the called upon dead happily slip through the gateway, to sit with loved ones by fireplaces made of clay. With bones warmed by their loved one’s fires and unsaid words now spoken, the dead return to their rightful place among the stars, to the place where all human beings were born.

Strangely, few attendees at the previous night’s festival noticed the strange behavior infecting dozens of individuals throughout the land, just days after the Samhain blood sacrifice. Those lucky enough to have their loved ones return for one night, and return to celestial paradise were much too happy to notice some eccentricities of one or two individuals in each village. Eccentricities such as cravings for raw meat, sensitivity to sunlight, or climbing trees in the middle of the night. People noticed that a few individuals, after that bloody night, seemed to age overnight. Dozens of young village inhabitants with greying hair, missing teeth, and wrinkled yellowing skin walked throughout the land as outcasts, as others shunned them as potential carriers of a strange illness, or curse. Everyone did noticed, as these very same individuals began committing gruesome murders throughout their villages against people they once called friend.

Things Left Unsaid

 Professor Todd Barringer is an Archeology Professor at The University of Pennsylvania. For the past twenty years he worked in and out of the classroom with a dual purpose always in his mind. His primary mission is to trot all over the globe, from the Lacandon jungle in the Southern Yucatan Peninsula, to the barren desert wastelands of Egypt. He was never very comfortable sitting behind a desk grading the plagiarized term papers of confused young men and women, who probably would never become archeologists in the end anyway. He knew, for most, his archeology course was more of a break in between getting high in the campus dorm rooms and, for some, figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. But every now and then, he would look into his audience of tired eyed bubble heads, and see one, maybe two, bright eyed youngsters with the learning spark twinkling in their eye. He called it the learning spark because he was convinced that the eyes were truly the windows to the soul. From the eyes we can see when a person is broken, bored, intelligent, in love, or in most cases, just plain stupid. So, his second mission was no doubt, finding the future archeologist after his own heart and molding her, or him, into the next torch carriers of this, as he thought, sometimes dull, sometimes fun, but never understood, profession.

  Like a doctor, or soldier on the battlefield, an active archeologist should rarely marry. Long months, and even years, spent in the field could produce quite a strain on a loved one back home. He sat in his University office grading mid-term papers and considered how lucky he was to meet Karen when they were just freshman at this very institution. Karen was a psychology major and filled with a kindness and gentleness Todd never saw in another living soul. She was independent, tough but gentle, intelligent but foolhardy, and above all else, in love with him, a backward nerd type fumbling with his mountain of texts in the crowded jungle of the college halls. Todd stopped grading his papers and kicked back in his soft leather office chair and thought about the still shapely figure of her Mediterranean hips. Her long black hair, dark eyes, and full cherry lips never lost their power to seduce him into submission, even after these long and happy twenty years since the day they met. They could never have children. After several failed attempts, the doctors gave the word that Karen could not bear any babies. In many, if not most, marriages, this news would have caused enough strain to break the relationship, but not them. Their marriage was based on unconditional love that seemed to have no bounds. He thought with a deep rising wave of guilt, maybe this is why I feel so bad about our argument this morning.

   The argument was a trivial matter indeed. Todd promised Karen that he would attend her annual dinner of Psychologists, scheduled for the weekend before Karen’s birthday. Todd forgot to check his calendar before making the promise. That week he was flying to Ireland to inspect the newly discovered mini Stonehenge, uncovered in the Eastern most part of the country. This was an opportunity that he could not pass up. High council members of the Archeologists Association were depending on him to survey the area and offer his expert analysis. Findings at the site could prove that ancient Druid civilizations possessed advanced astrological knowledge almost two thousand years before the birth of Galileo. Now, sitting in his increasingly cramped and darkening office, to match his darkening mood, he felt the need to call her and tell her what he failed to do as he was too busy accusing her of being needy, as he slammed his coffee mug on the kitchen table and raced out the door. He laughed to himself, for acting like such a foolish child, and reached for the phone to tell his beloved wife that he will cancel the trip because nothing is more important in the universe compared to her love.

  Just as his hand came within inches of the cell phone on his desk, he jumped a few inches off his chair as he heard the all too familiar ring, “Foxy Lady” by Jimi Hendrix, blare loudly from the phones minute speakers.

    “Hello, stated Todd, in a voice mixed with surprise, concern, and a hint of worry.

     “Todd Barringer, please,” came a soft female voice. The voice sounded both consoling and down to business at the same time. Reminded Todd of his wife’s tone.

    “Yes, this is Todd. How can I help you?”

“Sir, this is Officer Sandra Carson of the Pennsylvania State Police. I’m sorry to inform you sir, but your wife was in a car accident. She didn’t survive the impact.”

All Wishes are Heard by Something

  Six months after the fateful call of his wife’s death, Todd was no longer in disbelieving shock. He went on his journey, as planned, to the Druid site in Eastern Ireland. Keeping his mind as busy as he could, he pushed the memories of his wife away, like a bulldozer pushing garbage into a bottomless canyon. But this analogy of his was not entirely correct. He merely succeeded in packaging the mountain of memories into a small container, now bursting at the seams. However, this strategy worked, as it usually does with every feeling person, just long enough to get the job done. As if in a hypnotic trance, he gathered several artifacts from the site to include, shards of stone from each monolith, a piece of the stone alter, now nothing more than a pile of rubble, and a strange drawing found buried just outside of the monolith circle. The drawing was more of a painting, something one might see in a museum of modern art. The medium appeared to be a mixture of black charred material and thick red ink, as he thought, possibly blood. He was astounded that such a painting could last buried for thousands of years. Later analysis would prove that the red ink was indeed human blood, and the canvas was certainly made of human flesh, and not cow hide, as suggested by one of his students. Todd unrolled the painting and nailed it to the cork board just above his home office desk. He sat for several hours looking at the strange depiction of what appeared to be a Druid priest wearing the white face paint depicting a human skull. Gathered around the alter were at least a dozen similar figures with arms raised high to a deep red blood moon. Most perplexing of all, was a shadowy winged creature, done in black, hovering in the upper right-hand corner.

 Todd thought to himself with frustration, I spent months researching this figure with no luck. There is no mention of such a winged creature in Druid mythology.