by Jorge Silva
SACRIFICE
Some of the text has been modified from the translated version.
The author takes full responsibility for all changes made after translation.
Copyright © 2016 Jorge Silva Rodighiero
Copyright of the translation © 2016 Virginia McClain
All rights reserved
2nd Edition
ISBN-13: 9781542796101
ISBN-10: 1542796105
Things need not have happened to be true.
Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure
when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.
― Ephesians 6:12
0
Gabriel could barely keep running, but stopping wasn’t an option. The Shadows that pursued him were too close. He didn’t need to look behind him to know that.
He had never seen a Shadow before, but after the long minutes of running from them he knew them well enough. They wouldn’t stop until they had him.
Snow covered his brown hair, and his coat didn’t manage to protect him. It was so cold that his throat hurt with every breath. Yet he could sense that if one of the Shadows managed to reach him, he would feel a chill much colder than the air that surrounded him.
The stone walkway over which he ran offered him a clear path to follow. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten here, but that didn’t matter now. All that was left was to run. To escape. To prevent the Shadows from touching him.
It was a dark night, but a hoary light allowed him to see a few meters ahead of him. Though he couldn’t be sure, it seemed as if the light became brighter and brighter as he ran, as though he were getting closer to its origin.
How much longer would he have to run before he reached it?
It was then that he felt it. Something had grabbed him by the ankles. Something colder than the snow on which he trod. Gabriel tripped and fell hard to the ground.
The Shadows surrounded him and now he couldn’t see the light that he had been chasing. A darkness even blacker than the night enveloped him. He couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t even breathe. He knew he was going to die.
He was only fifteen.
Someone began to sing then; a feminine voice, sweet but firm. He couldn’t decipher the words, but he understood their meaning. They were about the light that he should reach.
The song sought him out, getting closer and closer to where he had fallen. The Shadows receded, as though they had been dispelled by the music, and he could once more see the light.
Clenching his teeth, numbed by the terror of being touched by them again, he ran. He ran with the speed of a man fleeing death itself.
The song grew fainter and fainter, but the light shone brightly on. When he was only a few meters from it, he no longer felt the Shadows behind him.
What he saw however was not a light, but rather a giant bird, whiter than snow, more radiant than the stars.
With a smile, Gabriel approached it and caressed one of its wings.
If he had thought he was going to die when the Shadows surrounded him, touching the bird was incomparably more painful. He felt his heart was going to explode, his body burned while his mind tried to reconstitute the ashes of who he once had been.
Gabriel awoke suddenly, gasping for air, his body stuck to sheets soaked with sweat.
It had been years since he had called for his mother when he had a nightmare. This time would be no different. He drank water from the glass left on his nightstand each night, and tried not to close his eyes. He knew that if he did he would once more see the Shadows.
He never imagined that in that same moment, something else had awoken.
1
The alarm was unnecessary, as Gabriel hadn’t been able to sleep after his dream. He waited until seven on the dot before descending the stairs to eat breakfast with his mother, as he did every day.
“How did you sleep?” she asked him, as she put milk and cereal on the table.
No matter how he had slept, for the last year he gave her the same reply. He didn’t want to add to her problems, and it was the only way he could think of to avoid more questions.
“Fine.”
“Your new teacher called me. Something about being distracted in class.”
Gabriel couldn’t discern if his mother’s tone was one of worry, exhaustion, or disappointment.
“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you trying harder in school?”
“I’m doing well in music,” he replied, to avoid telling her the truth. It wouldn’t be fair to remind her of what had happened the year before, and how that might be the reason for his lowered performance.
His mother placed her mug carefully on the table. The long breath she took before speaking made it abundantly clear that she didn’t find his answer adequate.
“If music is the only subject you’re going to try hard in, I’m not going to keep working extra hours to pay for one of the best high schools in the country.”
Gabriel looked at her, his hazel eyes surrounded by long lashes, the same as his father’s. He was exhausted from the broken sleep of the night before, but he was even more tired of his mother questioning him each morning. Before, he would have responded differently, but everything had changed a year ago. Gabriel simply said, “I’ve had enough of this,” and, leaving his breakfast uneaten he left the house, slamming the door behind him.
The last thing he could see through the window, before getting on his bicycle to head to school, was his mother crying. He watched her try to drink some of her coffee, but her sobs stopped her. It wasn’t easy to be both mother and father, but Gabriel knew that for her the hardest part was how he treated her.
Before heading to class Gabriel swung by the bathroom to wash his face and make sure no one would be able to tell that he’d been crying. He knew that both his tears and his mother’s weren’t because of their conversation that morning, so much as because of pain and rage from a myriad of things. It hurt him to disappoint his mother, and even worse to treat her like he had. He wished he had been able to better control what he said, but it wasn’t easy. Even less so since what had happened with his father.
“What happened to you, Big Ears? Did someone get to you before me?”
“Not today, Nick. Please. Not today.”
Nick was also fifteen, but he was stronger and taller. Gabriel was a little bit shorter than most of his classmates, with skinny arms and legs that he had never bothered to strengthen. Nick approached and grabbed him by the ears as he pushed him, making him fall onto the filthy tile of the bathroom floor. Then he took Gabriel’s backpack and turned it upside down over Gabriel’s head.
“When are you going to stop crying for your daddy?”
Still on the floor, Gabriel clenched his fists until he could feel his nails digging into his skin. If only he could humiliate Nick the way that Nick had humiliated him for so long. If only he were strong enough to beat him in a fight.
But he wasn’t. He got to his knees to pick up his things and, as he did every day, Nick kicked him in the ribs. Yet this time he didn’t feel any pain. Had his body somehow gotten used to the blows?
“I’m going to have to think of something new. This is boring me,” mumbled Nick. He left for class while Gabriel waited a few cautionary minutes to make sure he didn’t run into him in the hallway.
Fortunately, Gabriel’s first class of the day was with Mr. Galen, who was fairly lax about tardiness. Gabriel entered the room trying to m
ake as little noise as possible and Mr. Galen continued class without pausing.
“Who can give me the answer to this equation?” the teacher asked the room. Gabriel sat down and nodded in greeting to a few of his classmates.
Math was the subject Gabriel struggled the most to understand. Consequently, he didn’t even try to solve the problem. Although he wouldn’t have tried if it had been a question in English, history, or science either.
“No one wants to prove to Ignacio that he’s not the only one who can answer?”
Ignacio was a new student. He didn’t talk much; he hadn’t even told them which high school he’d attended before he came here. But everyone knew that his test scores were always perfect.
Some of the girls had tried to talk to him, even asking him out to the movies, but he always said no. Sometimes with words, sometimes just with his grey eyes. When he rejected Sophie, who everyone wanted to date, lots of people decided he wasn’t interested in girls. It wasn’t something, apparently, that he cared about disproving.
After an uncomfortable silence and a few incorrect answers, the teacher gave up and asked Ignacio to solve the equation. On his way to the board, the new student paused as he passed Gabriel’s desk, but then he continued on without speaking.
When the bell rang, Gabriel realized that Mr. Galen was in front of him. The teacher waited for the rest of the students to leave the room before asking a question.
“Can you come to my office during lunch?”
Gabriel agreed, sad that the only teacher who hadn’t called him to his office yet had finally done so.
He didn’t eat lunch, but went straight to Mr. Galen at the end of science class. The door was open. Gabriel went in and, after a sigh, simply said, “I’m sorry.”
The teacher looked up from the book he was reading.
“Why?” he asked, seemingly confused.
Gabriel didn’t know if Mr. Galen was messing with him, but he didn’t want to argue. After all, the man was the only person in the school who he respected. While the other teachers appeared to be concerned with reciting the bare minimum of content, Mr. Galen tried to infect students with the same passion that he felt for math. In addition, his laid back attitude towards tardiness and other transgressions of school rules made him a favorite with many students.
“I assume you told me to come here because I’m distracted in class.”
The teacher closed his book and left it on his desk.
“Were you distracted? Then I must not have been saying anything terribly interesting to you.”
“It’s not your class,” said Gabriel. Seeing the teacher’s smile, he corrected himself. “It’s not only your class. It’s life. It’s everything.”
Mr. Galen stood up, grabbed a few papers off one of his office chairs and put them on a bookshelf. He gestured for Gabriel to sit down.
Gabriel didn’t want another lecture, but he didn’t know how to avoid it. The teacher returned to his seat and picked up a sheet of paper from his desk.
“A blank page can seem boring. Certainly monotonous,” he said, as he showed Gabriel both sides of the blank sheet. “But you can fold it,” he continued, as he put it on the desk and carefully folded it down the middle. “You can wrinkle it.” With a smile he crumpled the paper between his hands. “And you can even burn it.”
Mr. Galen took a lighter from his pocket, and the sheet of paper began to burn until it was nothing more than smoke and ash.
“Where is it now?” his teacher asked him.
“Nowhere, you just burned it.”
“Nowhere? I don’t know where that is,” his teacher said, laughing in the same way that Gabriel had heard so many times in math class.
“Can you remember it?”
“Of course,” said Gabriel, as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. What point was Mr. Galen trying to make?
“Could you dream of it?” asked Mr. Galen, winking an eye.
“I suppose.”
“Then it’s somewhere.”
Gabriel had no interest in debating. The conversation sounded too much like one of his philosophy classes, a subject that didn’t interest him much, although that was because the teacher did nothing more than make them read biographies of philosophers.
“And if it’s somewhere, Gabriel, it can return to being here.”
Mr. Galen placed his hand above the ashes on his desk. When he moved his hand away the ashes had been turned into burned pieces of paper which began to move, slowly at first, getting closer to one another faster and faster, until they took on the shape of the sheet of paper. The math teacher put his hand above the burned sheet once more, and when he removed it, the paper appeared, folded and crumpled, but without a single sign of the fire that had reduced it to ash a minute earlier.
Gabriel got up from his seat in surprise. Was his math teacher a magician in his spare time?
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
Mr. Galen left the sheet on top of the desk and walked towards the door, gesturing for Gabriel to leave his office.
“Life can be very interesting, if one knows where to look.”
“What did Mr. Galen want?” Emily asked him when he arrived at his next class. She was the closest of all Gabriel’s classmates, although not as close as he would have liked.
“I have no idea,” he replied.
2
When he arrived home, Gabriel went straight up to his room and put on his headphones. He threw himself on the bed, closed his eyes, and let the music help him forget. Amidst the songs he found the company that he missed in his life.
A few minutes passed before his mother knocked on his door. As usual, he hadn’t said hello to her upon arriving home. She left a tray with a snack on his desk, and gestured with her hand for him to take off his headphones.
“How was school?”
“Fine,” he replied, while he escorted her from his room and closed and locked the door behind her. His mother knew him too well. If she looked at him closely she would know that something was wrong and, sooner or later, she would find out about the beatings from Nick. He didn’t want give her anything more to worry about.
Besides, he wanted to be alone. He had a lot to think about.
Today he had seen a piece of paper that had been completely incinerated reappear from its own ashes. He used the computer to look for information about magic tricks, but nothing that he found resembled what his teacher had done.
Somehow, it seemed like it wasn’t a trick. He remembered clearly how the ashes had turned into pieces of paper and how the burned parts had turned white again.
Perhaps his dream from the night before, along with not getting enough sleep, had contributed to him not being able to figure it out. He decided that on Monday he would go straight to Mr. Galen during lunch to ask him how he had done it.
Like most Fridays, he practiced guitar for a few hours, skipping dinner, and then went to bed.
Gabriel was worried that he would have the same nightmare as the night before, but that wasn’t the case. He couldn’t recall clearly what he had dreamed this time, but he woke up with a sense that in the dream he had been flying.
Smiling, he opened his bedroom curtains. Saturday was his favorite day of the week, as he met up with his band to play for hours.
When he arrived at the practice room he saw that Spider, the drummer, was already there. He didn’t want to mention the sheet of paper. At least not until he knew how his teacher had done it.
Emily arrived a bit late. She was the lead singer of the group and today she had decided to bring her new boyfriend to rehearsal. Gabriel felt like he’d been punched in the gut, but he wasn’t sure if that was from finding out that she had a boyfriend, or from who that boyfriend was.
“Nick has been playing bass for a few years, do you guys mind if he plays something and we can decide if he can be in the group?”
Gabriel didn’t say anything, but merely waited for Nick to start playing. For the f
irst time in years, he realized that he wasn’t angry with his classmate. Gabriel remembered how he himself had treated his mother recently and couldn’t help but understand Nick, if only a little bit. He even felt a bit sorry for him. “Who knows what’s going on in his life to make him feel the need to beat me up each morning,” he thought.
Nick got out his bass, the same black as Emily’s hair, and connected it to one of the amps. He had no way to know that it was Gabriel’s.
After playing for a few minutes Emily and Spider applauded. It had been a while since Gabriel had heard someone play as well as he did. Even if it was Nick; the music mattered more to him than his pride.
“Welcome to the band,” he said, as he unplugged the bass and plugged in his own guitar.
That night, as he got ready for bed, he worried he would have the nightmare again.
Instead, he dreamed about Nick, both of them in the school bathroom just like every morning. But this time it was Gabriel who did the pushing. Gabriel knew that he had Nick at his mercy, that he could give him a beating just like all the ones he had received. Then the image changed, and it wasn’t Nick, but his mother, on the floor. In an instant they were no longer in the bathroom, but in a meadow, and now it wasn’t just his mother but dozens of men and women, all at his feet, all at his mercy.
He awoke, surprised by the dreams that he was having lately. They felt far more real than the ones he was accustomed to.
He tried to stay in bed as long as possible. If Saturday was his favorite day of the week, Sundays were particularly difficult. For a long time that had been the day on which he went to the movies with his dad, but since he had died, everything had changed.
His mother had explained that she couldn’t afford to pay for someone else to clean the house anymore, so they had to do it themselves. Gabriel understood the situation, but that didn’t make him hate it any less.