The Wrath of Jeremy

by Stephen Andrew Salamon

  Victor stood by the entrance of the doorway and walked in, passing Jeremy and giving a sinister stare toward him. Jeremy stood against the wall, by where the old cross used to hang, and watched as Victor walked up to Mary and replied in a disoriented manner, “Um, well, he went into another attack, and he fell—to, to, to—the ground a lot. He fell so hard that he knocked himself out cold. He’s been sleeping ever since.” Mary then turned to Victor, squinted in disbelief and turned back to Gabriel, noticing the bloody mark on Gabriel’s arm, where the sharp needle full of unprescribed sleeping medication penetrated. “What did you give him?” Mary asked in an angry manner.

  “Oh, I just gave him a little something so he would have a good rest.”

  Jeremy noticed sweat dripping from Victor’s forehead: it was a type of sweat that meant he was lying through his teeth—the one tooth he had left—for reasons still unknown. Jeremy gaped at his sweat, how the drips seemed as if they were moaning, falling past his darkened eyes, trembling down his mouth and jumping to their deaths, soaring to the ground only to hit his large stomach that broke their fall. Victor gave out a strong scent of spoiled garbage baking in a summer’s sun. As Jeremy watched a single drop of sweat falling from Victor’s face, Mary turned around and looked past Victor and his stench, staring at the wall, realizing that the dust on it resembled the cross that once hung there. “Where is the cross that was hanging there?”

  “Oh, it fell and broke, so I took it out of here.”

  Mary then scanned the floor with her eyes of exquisiteness, squinting in confusion, demanding, “Why is the floor white? Wasn’t it green before?” Victor looked away from her and began laughing. “What’s so funny?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry, it’s just comical to realize that you don’t remember us painting this floor white. We did this last week.” Jeremy looked at Gabriel’s pale face while Victor laughed and answered to her question, seeing how innocent and uncontaminated he was, how angelic his bruised innocence seemed. A flush of angry memories roared past Jeremy’s mind, screaming through his soul, about how he remembered a time when his father inflicted pain, harsh pain to his body, causing bruises to develop over his legs, by a tree branch hitting them by his father’s force, all because he wore shorts when he was eight years of age, after his father demanded he wore pants instead; it was a cold day. Tears rushed through Jeremy’s lungs, filling up to his nose and allowing his eyes to seem as if they were beginning to melt. He tried to stop the thawing of his pupils by turning away from Gabriel’s bruises and staring toward the wall where Mary’s eyes were fixed.

  “Oh well, just make sure you get that cross back up on that wall,” demanded Mary. They exited the room and she walked with Jeremy to Michael’s room, with Jeremy still having hidden memories of abuse from his father haunting his inner eyes, causing Jeremy to close his eyes every so often as they walked, to try and think of something else, another vision. Walking down the hallway slowly, they both saw one of the staff members still running, not realizing that Mary and Jeremy were there yet. The man suddenly stopped when he saw Mary and Jeremy, and she just looked at him in confusion, not knowing why he was running to begin with. For now, it was as if the entire staff of Grewsal ran in panic because of Mary’s ignorance of Grewsal’s secrets, her unknowing that the knowing wouldn’t be unlocked just yet. To Jeremy, it was as if he knew more than Mary did about this place, at least for the time being; he knew that it was evil. But he kept his emotions for Grewsal deep inside of him, in the abyss of his mind where many other secrets lay as well.

  Garbage cans, silver and rusted at the bottom, stood on both sides of the hallway as they passed them, and Jeremy turned to one and noticed a noise coming from it; a small rattling. As he turned more to see what the rattling was, the man who ran walked past Mary and Jeremy, causing Jeremy to look away from the garbage can and stare at the man. That’s when they both entered Michael’s room, down the hall, allowing Jeremy to forget about the rattle in the garbage can, not knowing that soon he will find out what it was.

  For now, as they both entered Michael’s room, they found that he was nowhere to be found. “Where’s Michael?” she yelled out, jolting Jeremy. Her voice past through his head and entered the hallway where the man who was caught by her sight, running, immediately stopped dead in his tracks and rushed his thin figure down the hallway, in search of where the loud voice came from. He realized its orientation started from Michael’s room, so he ran toward it, begging his feet to run faster. As he rushed, trying to get to Michael’s room before the question rang out again, she shouted it inevitably once more, exhaling her worry as it traveled down the hallway past the man again, and it shook his brain, rattling it over and over again, like a nail scratching a chalkboard. Closer and closer he came to Michael’s room, trying to beg with his eyes for him not to hear her yell out again. Faster and faster, he kept up his stride, passing fat Victor in the process, and said, “I thought I told you to check on Michael!”

  “I’m sorry, Curtis, but I had to unstrap Gabriel first,” Victor said, before Curtis began running again. He came across Michael’s room as he wiped the sweat from off his face and tried fixing his long, blond hair, entering Michael’s room and catching the angry eyes of Mary. “Dr. Henderson, where’s Michael?” Mary asked, pulling Curtis into the room deeper by his long, black tie.

  “Um, who?” Curtis stuttered, with sweat forming on his palms. The enduring panic that Curtis abided by strung at his stomach like a harp, stinging his insides like a bee, and kicking his nerves like a horse’s hooves hitting a burning hot stone in the heat of a summer sun.

  “Don’t play dumb with me, you know who I’m talking about. I wanted to introduce Jeremy to him. I already tried to introduce him to Gabriel, but he’s sleeping. So, like I asked before, where’s Michael?” she asked again, with her eyes scanning Michael’s room and noticing dust on the wall that resembled a cross that once hung there. “And where the hell is the cross? What the hell is going on here? Listen to me, if you don’t tell me where the cross is and where Michael is at, I’m going to fire you!”

  “Um, Michael is—” Curtis tried to retort, when with astonishment he noticed Victor wheeling Michael in a wheelchair. “Michael is right here.”

  Victor and Michael entered the room, passing Curtis and Jeremy, and stopped right in front of Mary. She looked down at Michael and noticed his black hair was tangled. She knelt down to the floor and began stroking his hair and face, shaking him once, and noticed that his eyes wouldn’t open. She took her right hand and opened up his left eyelid to reveal one of his green eyes, and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Jeremy looked at Michael in a distressing, melancholy-filled way, seeing how innocent his sleeping eyes were, and contemplating what caused those eyes to become sleeping eyes. Jeremy knew the bruises on Gabriel had to come from somewhere other than Victor’s excuse, but where did Michael’s bruises lie, if he had any?

  Will I get bruises like Gabriel…?

  Jeremy pondered these thoughts, wondering about the answer and its possible karma connection, wondering if he did anything bad in his past to even deserve bad karma and be inflicted with bruises. Nevertheless, he still pondered over Michael’s sleeping eyes as he heard Mary yell out to Victor and Curtis, “I asked, what is wrong with him?”

  Curtis and Victor looked at each other in fright, trying to come up with an answer, with Curtis finally saying in a faltering stutter, “Well, he had another attack, so I had to give him an injection to calm him down. That’s also why the cross is missing, he saw Jesus talking to him through it.”

  Mary remembered that Jeremy was with her, and didn’t want him to see the Grewsal staff’s incompetence. So she got up from her knees, smiled and turned to face Jeremy, saying with ease, “Well, I’ll introduce you to him tomorrow, we’re going to have a session with you, Michael and Gabriel together. That way you’ll be able to get to know each other.” She turned her eyes away from Jeremy and looked at Victor. “Now, Victor, I
want you to show Jeremy to his room. We have a long day tomorrow, I want Jeremy to have as much sleep as possible.”

  Victor bowed his large head slightly to her and then picked up Michael, slowly placing him in his bed, all the while feeling Mary’s eyes on his back like nails. He knew that she was watching every move he made toward Michael. Victor even went as far as kissing his fat, sweaty hand and placing the hand on Michael’s forehead, to attempt to show his supposedly kind side. Mary smiled at that but Jeremy didn’t; he read right through Victor’s obesity, knowing that he had an evil profile to his dim aura, and kept himself with eyes wide open, preparing his mind for Victor’s words when Mary wasn’t around. He knew Victor would change once Mary left, and Jeremy thought he was ready for it. Victor walked back to the wheelchair and waited for Jeremy to sit in it.

  “That’s okay, I can walk, thank you,” Jeremy said to Victor, looking at him with ominous eyes.

  “No, sir, I insist that you sit in the chair.”

  Jeremy began walking out from the room, reminding him, “I said I could walk!”

  Mary walked out of the room as well, and saw that Victor was beginning to get upset, even angry toward Jeremy for not sitting in the wheelchair. Mary then turned to Curtis, rolling her eyes at the abrupt and short dispute that Victor was having with a child, and said, “You know what, better yet, I’ll show Jeremy to his room. Also, I just remembered, I spoke to Gabriel’s mother about ten minutes ago; she said that she’d bring his clothes and belongings tomorrow. Make sure that Gabriel gets them.”

  Mary strolled down the hallway with Jeremy, leaving Curtis and Victor gawking at their shadows, which were created from the circular fluorescent lights hanging above them, enlarging and creating their shadow silhouettes as they passed by each bulb, with Curtis and Victor standing stiff. They watched them walk slowly, perceiving their bodies getting smaller as they entered the end of the hallway, allowing Victor and Curtis to breathe heavily with anger, and causing Victor to question, “Is that the one?”

  Curtis turned slowly to him, chewed a bit on his bottom lip, then turned back to face Jeremy and Mary, watching as they entered a room at the end of the hallway.

  Still staring where Jeremy and Mary used to be, Curtis replied in a foreboding tone, “Yep, he’s the one alright.”

  They both ground their teeth together and looked intently at each other. They had one plan on their minds, a mysterious idea, one that Jeremy would soon find out the meaning of.

  CHAPTER SIX

  David walked into the jailhouse room with chains on his wrists and ankles. They hit at his ankles hard, forming bruises on them that promised more pain. He paced slowly, timidly, fearing the chains would hurt his ankles even more if he built up his momentum, and the guards knew it. The guards pushed David, forcing him to walk faster or else trip over his own two feet, and the pain from the chains knocked and struck at his newly formed bruises, causing jolts of torturous agony to bolt from David’s ankles again, causing his teeth to meet with his tongue, making it bleed out. Tasting the blood that poured out of his tongue wound quickly, David cooperated, taking it like a man and penguin-walked down the hallway.

  He reached a room and the guards opened the door, pushing David in, making him tumble to the floor and hit the side of his head. He got up, without the help of the guards, by rolling over to a wall and pressing his back against it and squirming his weight against the wall, literally bringing his own body weight up by forcing his muscles to defy gravity. Once up, he saw mirrors on opposite sides of the room with a single brown table in the center of it. The walls were painted a dirty gray, making the confined room seem even smaller. Two guards placed him in a chair, throwing him down to his seat, and pulled his hair for a second. Laughing at their abuse, they then both walked out of the room and closed the door, locking it. David gazed into the mirror in front of him, spitting out blood from his tongue wound, and perceived that he was really looking at his worst enemy. He gawked at his long, black hair and freckly face, filling his mind with so much rage that he spit a large ball of saliva at his reflection, mixed with chunks of blood. He watched the saliva slowly fall past his reflection, crawling past his face and onto the gray painted walls.

  As he stared at the spit, he remembered a mysterious life again, unlike his own, reflecting in his mind what Jesus told him through his thoughts. The fear of realizing that a figure called “Jesus” spoke to him made David even more terrified within, causing a form of unknown retribution to tumble about and create pure drops of melancholy to rain upon his soul. It started a transformation within David, causing him to feel this unknown life and its memories, reaching into the depths of his soul, mind and consciousness. Suddenly he squinted. Pure pain pulsed in his temples, like a vise squeezing against his head and filling his mind with memories in the process. Tears came flushing out through his eyes, passing down across his bloody mouth, and the sound of lightning could be heard by his ears. His tears turned to blood, the sound of thunder turned to echoes of angels screaming a high pitch of fury, and his hands started to shake vigorously.

  Then it stopped. David opened his bloody eyes, and a pure memory of some life, some state of consciousness came to him. Vigilance was with him completely, even more so than when Jesus touched his forehead yesterday. That’s when he stared through the bloody saliva on the mirror and looked at his reflection a different way, as if he just met it. He studied his image, smiling at it, and then he turned his head and looked at the mirror behind him and gazed at his back in the reflection. He asked, “Well, if I’m an angel, where’re my wings?”

  He turned back around to face the front mirror as the door to the room opened. In came an old man with a long beard and an eyeglass in his left eye, strolling in slowly and letting out gas at every step he made, creating a large, spitting sound as if the gas was also pushing out diarrhea in morsels. David crunched his own face, lifting up his lips and flaring his nostrils in a look of disgust. The man pulled up a chair that was on the left side of the room and sat directly across from him, with David hearing swishy sounds as the man sat, as if he sat on a bag of water and broke it open.

  The man ignored his gas condition, knowing that David heard it by the face he was making. The man just stared at him while opening up his briefcase and pulling out David’s files. He also pulled out a miniature tape recorder and placed it on the middle of the table, next to carved initials and comments of a sexual nature. “Hey, Frank, how are you doing?” David asked as Frank pressed the record button on the recorder. “I see you still have the gas problem, huh?”

  Frank looked at David while taking off his eyeglass. “Never mind. David, the question is, how are you doing? Your mouth is bleeding, and you have blood all over your face. Do you know this?” Frank saw that David was nodding, and just gave a sigh, like he was looking down at David. Frank then turned away from David’s brown eyes and looked at the mirror in back of him, knowing that guards were behind the glass listening and spying. He turned to face David again and added in a low tone, “David, what’s this I hear about you saying you’re an angel?”

  David looked at Frank’s wrinkly neck and noticed a necklace hanging from it; it was a necklace of the holy cross. David fixed his eyes on the cross strongly, seeing that he was looking at it now a different way, in a way a person would look at a long-lost friend being found. He replied, “Because…I…am an angel. I don’t know, Frank, I don’t know why I have this memory with me, but I am an angel! Would you rather hear me say I’m an axe murderer?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I would; at least it’s believable. David, listen to me, in the past you’ve told me many things about you seeing statues moving. But you always told me that you’ve only seen them while you were on LSD,” Frank stated, opening up David’s files and letting out another large gas bubble that made its way through the wooden seat and traveled quickly to David’s nose. “It says here that you’ve been in trouble with the law a lot. As a matter of fact, you’ve been in trouble with the law on
a daily basis, ever since you were nine years old. The point I’m trying to make to you is why, of all people, you would say you were an angel? I thought angels were good—are they not?” Frank sarcastically asked, handing David’s files to him and adding, “If you said you were an axe murderer, it would make my job so much easier.”

  David looked down at the files, blinking his eyes over and over again, seeing there was some truth in what Frank spoke of, believing that maybe he was crazy. But he closed the files immediately and comprehended that every wrongdoing or evil act that was written in the folder was in the past; he was now a new person, yet with the same silhouette as before.

  David handed the files back to Frank and replied, “An angel can be in any form, the only form that you believe in are the clichés that you were taught. All I remember, Frank, is that I’m an angel; I don’t remember anything else.”

  Frank smirked at his remark, finding it funny in a psychotic way. “Oh, so you say you’re an angel, but you don’t have any reason as to why you are. Listen, David, I’m going to be straightforward with you—if you keep up this ‘angel’ talk, you’re going to end up in a nuthouse!” Frank yelled out.

  David heard his voice as a distant echo as soon as he noticed the cross on Frank’s neck beginning to glow. The room darkened slowly to David’s own eyes, as if a storm approached and covered the sun, yet it was the room’s light bulb dimming.

  “David, right now there are people behind those mirrors watching you, watching and hearing every word you say. I have been your lawyer ever since you were fourteen years old—I work for your father, for crying out loud. But, even though you’re rich and have a good family, you still sell drugs on the streets, and now you’re claiming that you’re an angel. Is this some kind of call for attention?” yelled Frank.