The Wrath of Jeremy (12 page)

“I’ll be right back,” she said. The guard
unlocked the outside of the door, while she unlocked the inside.
She exited the room, with no one realizing yet that Gabriel was
still watching the glowing cross.

Jeremy got up from his chair and walked
through the clutter of the room that he and Michael created during
their brawl. He gazed out of the broken, barred window and felt the
fresh air blowing against his confused skin, hearing Michael say,
“This conversation is getting boring. I don’t know about you guys,
but I’m gonna go back to my room and leave you two religious
fanatics be!” Michael noticed, not understanding why, that Jeremy
was staring heavily at and out the window. “It’s a window, Jeremy,
haven’t you ever seen a window before?” Michael sarcastically
asked.

The cross in Gabriel’s hand began to glow
even more now, but no one other than Gabriel noticed it yet. Jeremy
turned to face Michael, and breathed out, “What is the difference
between this window and all the other windows that are in this
place?”

“Is this a trick question? Because right now
I don’t really feel like playing games,” replied Michael with
arrogance.

“Alright, I’ll ask you again. What’s the
difference between this window, and all the rest in this
place?”

“I don’t know. My guess is you can see out of
this one more clearly!”

“Exactly—you can. The bars on them are wide
enough to squeeze through. Listen to me, I don’t know about you
guys, but I want to get the hell out of here soon. My guess is that
they’re not going to let us go anytime soon. This window doesn’t
have any bars that are close together. It’s just a bunch of bars
separated greatly and glass that we broke. So we could escape
through it,” Jeremy explained.

“Dude, it sounds like a bulletproof plan, but
there is a flaw in it, just a little one.” Michael giggled, wanting
Jeremy to know it was sarcasm. “There happen to be guard dogs that
roam around at night. I’ve been in this room more times than you
have; trust me, I already tried it. The nurses and techs know about
the dogs, and know that we know about the dogs. I broke it one time
and actually jumped fourteen stories to the ground. I broke nothing
luckily, but I did suffer severe dog bites. This fat tech and a
doctor laughed at me while two pit bulls were mauling my arm. Only
after they swallowed eighteen chunks of my skin did the bastards
help me. If I were you, I would try to make the best of this place,
because there is no way out!” Michael paused and watched Jeremy,
seeing that his eyes weren’t on him, but something else. “What are
you looking at?”

Michael followed Jeremy’s sight to the
glowing beacon of the cross. They all saw it and gawked at it in
amazement. Gabriel dropped the cross and it fell to the ground in
slow motion, a motion that was not real to their sight, but real in
reality. A flash of illuminating light came from it, piercing their
eyes, and then they heard a voice through the light. “Find the
Shroud, and the Kerchief, leave in exactly one month. Find it and
you’ll be cured!”

The boys were baffled at the message that was
given through the light, struck by mystery that engulfed their
sight and closed it to create a puzzle of unknown pieces. Slowly,
Jeremy approached it, the cross of light, the thing they all
feared, while holding onto his bottom lip, pulling at it to calm
his nerves that were torturing his mind. “My God. Um, where is this
Shroud and Kerchief you speak of?” asked Jeremy with nerves choking
his voice, seeing the light becoming brighter at every breath they
took in. Their nerves were like hands, strangling their air
passage, making it hard for breath to go in and out of their lungs.
Yet, they waited anxiously for the next words that came from an
invisible place in the luminosity of exquisiteness.

Michael yelled out, “Don’t talk to it, you’re
just allowing your mind to get even more crazy and delusional!”

“Shut up,” Jeremy responded.

Michael looked away from the light, hearing
the blaze of fiery light say, “The Holy City—go to the Holy City
and you will capture it!”

“How do we know when we find it?” Gabriel
asked.

“You will know. I will let you know. Gabriel,
you are the East. Michael, you are the South. And Jeremy, you are
the North. Guide my army.” The voice spoke, with words that boggled
Michael’s mind.

With a rage-filled motion, wind came flying
in through the window of broken glass, forcing itself in and racing
about and around the room, blowing at all of them who stood in its
path, allowing the cross to grow with a greater intensity of light,
as if it was fire being fed with the natural oxygen it ate. It grew
larger, and the blaze of a fire took the place of the light,
creating heat that was felt by Jeremy, Gabriel and Michael, as if
it was angry about Michael’s confusion. Even though Michael didn’t
say he was boggled, it was as if the flame knew his thoughts,
showing them all its mighty power, creating the room and turning it
into an inferno of might. Yet, the flame alarmed Michael enough not
to question it to rid himself of being confused. Jeremy started to
become boggled by the fire, but its flames were too great for
Jeremy to ask anything. When it came to Gabriel, his confusion
toward the flames wasn’t enough for him to stay quiet. So, Gabriel
questioned, “But what about the West? And guide what army? What
does any of this mean?”

“The West is on his way. Guide my army, and
you will be cured!”

Suddenly, as mysteriously as it was born, the
flame turned back into a light, and the light from the cross went
out, along with the wind ceasing to exist, leaving the three boys
there in a messy room, sitting on the floor motionless, mystified
and perplexed. They looked at each other: it was as if they’d just
seen a ghost. They watched each other closely, gazing at each
other, wondering what the other was thinking. They then turned to
the door and watched it, seeing that it was slowly opening. It was
Mary, and before she stepped in, Jeremy asked, “So do you still
want to try escaping from this place, Michael?”

Michael looked at him, rolled his eyes a bit,
and responded, “Well, if this experience really happened, and we
all saw it, and a voice really said to us that we’ll be cured if we
go, then ‘yes.’ I guess we’re leaving in a month!”

Mary sat down again and looked at the boys
with a smile, noticing that the room was a little bit messier than
before. She saw the cross lying on the ground, but refrained from
broaching that topic. Instead she grinned, and kindly asked, “Well,
boys, let’s begin the session, shall we?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
ime passed
gradually to the eyes of Jeremy. Night and day, storms and clear
skies: they all told their lives to Mary and other doctors, over
and over again, but never told them about the day when Jesus spoke
to them all. Some secrets were meant to be secrets, and this one
they kept to each other, coveting to empathize with themselves,
with a desire, a dream of finding some explanation for it. Yet they
couldn’t. Thirty days went by in total, and October 25 came for
Michael, Gabriel and Jeremy’s bewildered psyches, slower than death
could come to an elderly chap. Yet, before the twilight of the
twenty-fifth arrived, and its deeper meaning, the boys premeditated
their escape route from Grewsal very circumspectly, believing in
only what their King told them, yearning for its authenticity to be
real, and for them to realize that a mission was born for them
all.

Arguments against it arose in their minds,
still pending in their thoughts, and they quarreled whether it was
an illness or not; they all decided if it was a sickness to just go
with it, and maybe it would lead them to a cure within themselves.
Their “escape from Grewsal” was what Jeremy named it, being that
they hadn’t breathed fresh air for thirty days; their passion for
escape was more than just a passive undertaking—it meant freedom.
They knew they wouldn’t be getting better, inferior to their own
demented minds, especially after having intimate conversations
between the three of them, they figured they would never be cured.
If so, then Grewsal would be their permanent home. Every hour of
all thirty days, the boys went over every inch of the Grewsal
institution, studying dissimilar times the guards would go on and
off duty, and the different feeding times they gave to the guard
dogs that only could be heard in the night through the boys’ barred
windows, and never seen. The preparation and planning for their
escape were brought on by one word, one word that shined a smile to
their faces, one word that gave them hope: “cured”, which Jesus had
spoken to them.

Through the pain and disillusioned faith of
their own cynical minds, no doctor or loved one had ever spoken
that word to them, and once it was verbalized by the beauty of a
man they knew their whole lives, it opened a passageway in their
intellect, a way that called to them, passing its message of hope
to them all. They were content, with some hope that they’d finally
found some faith, at least a morsel, that would heal their minds if
they took it on, even if it did sound crazy if told to an outside
party. One day, very soon, their so-called “sickness” would be
cured, and hope that they’d finally have a normal future ran
through their eyes, sent tickles up their spines, allowing them to
focus on the escape from Grewsal, what had seemed almost impossible
thirty days ago. It was as if they forced their minds to believe in
what Jesus spoke. They didn’t have anything to lose except their
sanity, which they figured was already gone.

The boys made a map of the institution on a
piece of toilet paper, since they weren’t permitted paper or any
other material in their possession—Grewsal trying to say that the
patients might try killing themselves with paper cuts or something
along those lines. They wrote and sketched almost every angle and
every corridor that the fortress held on the toilet paper, even the
different stairways and what they imagined the guard dogs would
look like were a part of their rough draft. Yet after it was all
complete, Jeremy, as well as Michael and Gabriel, would stare off
at the white stars that covered the sky at night, and hear the
invisible growls of the dogs that hummed in the darkness. Even
though Michael knew what the dogs looked like from his escape
experience that went bad, Michael would tell them that the growls
coming from the dogs now were different than the growls before,
meaning that Grewsal hired different guard dogs, and their
imaginations made them colossally huge and viscous creatures that
only knew the taste of blood.

Nevertheless, their final plan was simple. On
the twenty-sixth of October, they were to sneak into Mary’s office
and escape through her window, and the best time to escape was at
midnight.

“The dogs get fed at midnight and the day
guards go off duty; that’ll give us about five minutes to get the
hell out of here,” Michael said on the twenty-fourth of October.
“We leave in two days. The bars on the windows are wide enough to
slip through; it’s almost too easy!”

Jeremy comprehended that they had to form a
second plan, just in case the first one didn’t work out. After all,
once hearing from Gabriel and Michael that the nurses and techs
beat them before Jeremy came to Grewsal, they knew it would only be
time before they started up again with the abuse, and this escape
was more important than they first anticipated. So, before the
twenty-fifth came, Jeremy snuck down to the basement of Grewsal and
discovered a secret passageway that led to a sewer cap. The
basement was dark, gloomy, dirty, filled with bugs and stank of old
urine that was soaked into the walls. Jeremy smelled the stench of
sewage and followed it to its strongest point, leading him to the
doorway of escape that was camouflaged as a large circular cap for
sewage. He pried the cap open with a steel pipe he found hidden in
the darkness, and entered the sewer system. He saw a short tunnel
beyond him, knowing that this had to lead to the outside world.
Using his head, Jeremy brought with him a roll of yarn that he
stole from sewing class. Jeremy tied the piece of yarn to a metal
pipe that was sticking out in the sewer, right next to the entrance
he entered in through, and then walked about thirty steps. Then he
came across a ladder, so he tied the other end of the yarn to the
ladder and climbed up it, lifting up another sewer cap very gently.
He looked out of it and discovered he was right next to the
staircase that led up to Grewsal. He wrote down the direction for
the second plan on a separate sheet of toilet paper. He didn’t
discuss the second plan with Gabriel or Michael, didn’t breathe a
word of it, knowing that Michael, especially, would get upset at
him if he found out that Jeremy was taking charge of the
situation.

Jeremy found out that Michael was the type of
person who loved being in control of things, especially when it
came to something like escaping the fortress called Grewsal. He saw
that Michael was tough on the outside, but weak within, sort of
like a jack-o’-lantern, a rotten jack-o’-lantern filled with
maggots that had been dormant in its orange pulp for weeks. But,
through his toughness, Jeremy still put up with his smart remarks,
condescending persona and snotty attitude, enduring it because
Michael was in the same boat as him, the same boat that was sinking
as each day passed. Michael and he didn’t make good on a friendship
so far, yet companionship was important to Jeremy, feeling and
sensing that they would be together a lot longer than after their
escape from Grewsal—if there was an escape at all.

As for Gabriel, Jeremy saw a frail person
inside and on the out. Every argument that Michael and Jeremy would
have, Gabriel would always agree with Michael, since he was his
brother. Jeremy assumed that Gabriel just didn’t want to upset his
brother, Michael. Yet, even with Jeremy absorbing their characters
and understanding them, he didn’t want to deal with them. There was
no time to show them who they were, and try to change them for the
better. He wasn’t there to make friends. Yet, in both of them,
whether he saw strength or weakness, he noticed one thing that they
both possessed, something he couldn’t explain; it was as if they
both carried a secret within them that they didn’t even know they
had themselves. The way they acted toward each other and Jeremy was
as if they didn’t trust each other or Jeremy. But of course Jeremy
had more important things to take care of, not having time or
energy to investigate their mental knots.