“Thank you, Mary, for that brief introduction to religious history,” said Michael with sarcasm. Jeremy and Gabriel started to move their seats closer to her; their curiosity caused them to listen even more to Mary’s words.
“Why, you’re welcome, Michael, now are there any more questions you wanted to ask?”
Michael began tapping his foot on the hardwood floor; he wanted to annoy them.
They all knew that Michael’s tapping was because he yearned to annoy them all, but they all ignored his passive aggressiveness, and Jeremy questioned to Mary, “Actually I have one more question. What’s the Kerchief of Veronica?”
Mary looked away from Jeremy, letting her eyes wander throughout the room. She wanted to find a special way to tell him, as well as the rest. Because it was such a special answer, Mary lined up the words in her mind, and then looked back at him, answering, “Jeremy, before Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he had to carry his own cross to the place where he was going to see his last glimpse of life. As he carried it, a woman by the name of Veronica ran up to him and wiped the bloody sweat from his brow. They say that his image was imprinted on the cloth. But Saint Veronica is just a legend, no one knows if that incident really occurred.”
The cross in Gabriel’s hand started to glow, but no one noticed it, not even Gabriel. “But if it’s not a legend that means that the Kerchief is still out there, and it has the real Jesus portrait on it. Am I right?” asked Jeremy, noticing that Michael stopped pounding his foot on the ground. Michael was also listening to Mary’s reply.
“Yes, that means it does have his image. Why do you want to know so much about this?”
Suddenly, after noticing some shakiness in Mary’s answer, Gabriel looked down at the cross he was holding and noticed a small beacon was beginning to illuminate from its wooden body. Before he could even say anything to the others, Jeremy spoke out, “I don’t know, call me curious George, I guess. But anyway, so far we know where the Shroud is.”
“No, Jeremy, that Shroud in Turin is a fake. Didn’t you know that, Mary?” asked Michael in a snotty manner, not noticing that Gabriel kept on staring at the glowing cross, while everyone else stared at each other. It was the glowing object that put him in a state of shock, shock that caused his voice to be hidden, watching the illumination growing brighter. “They ran tests on the cloth or Shroud, I think it was in 1988, and found out that it had to have been made between 1260 and 1390 AD, I think. So that means that Jesus couldn’t have possibly worn it!”
The conversation was becoming even more endowed with interesting knowledge of a stimulating nature that allowed the ignorant to become not so ignorant. Yet, Michael’s input was broken by the sound of knocking coming from the door. Mary got up from her chair and walked toward the door.
“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 cu
red!”
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
Time 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 th
e 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.
So October twenty-fifth came, and their nerves were flaring, anxiety was building, with them hardly being in the mood to eat as the three of them were having lunch in a separate cafeteria that allowed them to not be in contact with the other patients. It was Mary’s doings that allowed them to get this special treatment.
Gabriel gawked at his meat loaf that shined out in its fatty, yellow meat, saying as he swallowed a gulp of his acid-filled saliva, “I’m nervous, guys.”
Jeremy nodded his head, sitting across from Gabriel, with Michael sitting to Gabriel’s right. Jeremy took a sip of his milk, and responded to them both, “I know—me, too. Tomorrow is the day.”
Jeremy scanned the large, vacant cafeteria, seeing guards, techs and nurses behind the large, glass window that stood by the locked entrance of the room, and slowly pulled out a piece of toilet paper from his armpit. Being that Jeremy, Michael and Gabriel sat at a single table, which was the only piece of furniture in the room in the very center of the cafeteria, they had to be sneaky, seeing the guards, on the outside of the room, staring in at them from time to time. Jeremy placed the toilet paper in his lap, and saw that Michael started to scan the room as well. Michael whispered, “Alright, listen, guys, after we leave tomorrow night, where the hell are we going? This whole time we were discussing how to get out of here, but we never discussed where we’re going. Maybe we are nuts.”
The Wrath of Jeremy Page 9
