The Wrath of Jeremy (26 page)

So, very slowly, they all searched the room,
when suddenly Mary whispered, “My God, they must have sewed it into
the carpet. That has to be it.” So the search began, with Gabriel
searching behind the bed while the rest of them searched in the
front of it, concentrating on the carpet, trying to see if their
eyes could capture some difference in its design. Sam then noticed
a small part of the rug that was a lighter shade of brown while
they still searched in their spots, leaving her there in amazement.
She looked more closely, noticing that it was the other piece of
the Kerchief, shining out with another part of Jesus’s image. Sam
ripped it off, tearing it gently, and ripping it like dried bread
due to the carpet being so old and worn out. Once the rest of them
noticed what she was doing, they hurried over to her spot and saw
her eyes looking at a piece of rug in amazement, seeing her holding
the piece in her hands and smiling at it. Sam found the other part
of the Kerchief, and they all joined in and watched as they tried
to imagine what he looked like before they put the puzzle
together.

“All we have to do now is find the upper part
of the Kerchief, the part where they show his eyes and hair,” said
David.

They rose up from the ground and exited the
room slowly, heading toward the front part of the building quietly.
“Hey, David, if you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you use your
powers and read the Shroud? I mean, you must understand Hebrew, you
surely do speak it well,” Gabriel mentioned, entering the front
room of the small building.

They exited the building, noticing the sun
had set and night had fallen quickly. David turned to Gabriel and
replied, “I know, I could read it, but, like I told you before, I
can’t tell you anything. Listen, I don’t know anything else except
who we are and why we’re here. As soon as you find out, then you’ll
be able to read the Shroud yourself, so get off the subject. What
time is it?”

“It’s 11:54 p.m. American time, so I guess
it’s morning here,” Michael replied, trying to search in every
direction for the sun’s body. The darkness was complete, to the
point where not even a heavy cloud could be that thick for the sun
having it as a hiding place. They rubbed their eyes over and over
again, trying to come up with an explanation for the sun’s
disappearance, but all they could see was darkness.

“Where’s the sun at?” Gabriel asked, looking
through the darkness and feeling the dead birds under his feet as
he walked slowly with them all.

“That’s what I would like to know,” said
Jeremy. He unexpectedly noticed a small gush of wind hitting his
body, feeling stronger wind that followed almost immediately. “This
must be one of the signs,” he added, noticing the wind beginning to
blow harder, as if something was trying to stop them. Their feet
forced their bodies to rush over to the tavern where the last piece
of the mystery to Jesus’s image was at, ignoring the wind, the
darkness, and the birds that lay dead on the ground and rooftops.
Their eyes were only set on one thing: the mission that still
seemed like they had an eternity to finish.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
he sunlight gazed
across the sandy beach, and great wind floated through the air and
traveled with great speed toward Jeremy’s mother’s face. It dried
her newly formed tears, as she looked out at the sand, afraid to
look up, not wanting to see what the people around her were seeing.
As she gawked at the sand, she overheard a red-haired man saying to
a television camera, “There is a perfectly reasonable explanation
for this!” The boys’ parents were all standing on the beach looking
out at the ocean in awe, and Jeremy’s mother was still hunched over
toward the beach, crying silently upon the grains of sand, with
each grain being the only witness to her tears of great struggle
and misery. The wind grew stronger, hearing people around her
screaming in fright, screeching to be heard, whining and weeping
out their worst fears, and she still gaped at the sand, still
afraid to look up and see what they were seeing, to feel what they
were feeling from their eyes capturing something of great
terror.

“I don’t want to see what they see. It can’t
be true,” she cried to herself, holding onto her husband’s hand
tightly, rubbing his fingers up and down. It was as if her love was
too great, too grand for him to just have her hand in his and do
nothing else but hold onto it. She then glanced at his eyes, and
saw him looking out at the seas, hearing his thoughts, feeling his
fright, causing her to look down again at the sandy beach and see
her puddle of tears and how they hit the sand and vanished into its
brown texture. She then caught sight of another pile of tears that
dropped in the grains. So she followed the tears, leading up to her
husband’s face, falling from his eyes, as he still gazed out at the
seas. Without another thought, she knew she had to see what he was
seeing, what the crowd was perceiving that caused their nerves to
fry. With the wind growing so strong, blowing some of those who
were weak down to the ground, Jeremy’s mother finally looked out at
the ocean’s body, and widened her eyes with amazement.

“The ocean must’ve sprung a leak or
something,” she overhead the red-haired man say to the television
camera. She watched the ocean, its water being no longer in it. She
stared down at it, till she saw darkness in its abyss,
distinguishing the canyons, reefs and abysses that the ocean
withheld without water flowing over them. As the wind blew into the
ocean, a great titanic canyon without water, it made a whistling
noise, a sound that frightened the people, noises that sounded like
children screaming.

“My God, Frank, what’s happening?” Jeremy’s
mother cried, watching the darkness of the ocean give out a cold
feeling to her flesh.

“Is it also true that the sun is in a form of
hibernation?” a journalist asked, pointing at the sky, all of their
eyes seeing the sun being covered slowly by a great black cloud.
The cloud wrapped itself around the sun, covering every inch of its
rays; the people felt the coldness already that the sun protected
them from.

A man who was being interviewed by the
journalist who pointed at the sun, shook his head while answering,
“Listen, I’m not a scientist of astrology, I’m just an
oceanographer!”

Suddenly the wind caused the lights on the
television cameras to burn out. The people ran away, grasping fear
in their bellies and in their minds. As they ran, Jeremy’s mother
yelled out, “Jeremy, where are you?”

“I can’t believe it, this is amazing! I would
have never thought I would see the day when the ocean is no longer
an ocean. This is one big land now,” Jeremy’s father said, holding
onto Jeremy’s mother in his grasp.

Jeremy’s mother stopped and hugged her
husband in his ignorance tightly in her arms, while staring at the
great pit of an ocean, and saying quietly, “I don’t care how
amazing this is, I just want my baby back. Something’s wrong,
Frank. It’s as if I know Jeremy has something to do with this. I
just want him home, in my arms, feeling his heartbeat. Please, God,
bring him home.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

J
eremy watched the
old woman, still sitting in her chair in the same place, the same
position, with an inexplicable glare that stretched throughout the
murky room, and Jeremy paused, maintaining his eyes on hers. Then,
with his sight still sharply aimed at her eyes filled with unknown
prophecies, Jeremy hurled the two parts of the Kerchief on the
table alongside her. Her aged, ripened hand elevated from its
resting place on her lap and slammed down on the two parts,
stopping their momentum before they fell to the floor from Jeremy’s
thrust.

“Here, we have them all now, what next?”

The woman smiled at him. She placed the
pieces together to form one, doing it slowly, as if she knew they
wanted to see the man’s image on the cloth. Through her teasing of
their eyes, an excitement mixed with speculation went through their
minds, seeing that the old woman was taking her time in placing
such a simple puzzle together, made up of only two pieces with the
image being the greatest puzzle of all. Finally, she placed all
three pieces together completely, and they all slowly surrounded
the table, seeing the one mystery that the whole world was born to
see, would love to see and to solve: the revealing of the Lord’s
image.

Enthusiasm. Wonder. All of them opened their
mouths in admiration, staring at a light brown face with blue eyes.
This image had long, black, silky hair with a smile that showed
pain in its cloth-captured grin.

“Oh my God,” said Jeremy. He looked at the
image more closely, adding, “I had no idea he looked like
that!”

“Wait a second, the Jesus I saw at my house,
when he came out of the painting, has no resemblance to this man,”
Gabriel stated with bafflement.

“How come?”

The old woman leisurely turned her face
toward Gabriel while keeping her hands on all three parts of the
Kerchief. “Because, Gabriel, the image that you saw before was what
Man thought the Lord looked, and should look like. This whole time,
different races were fighting over the color of Jesus’s skin, when
this whole time they were all wrong. The color of the skin that you
see before you has no resemblance to any color you see on a human
being. This image has a different type of color to his face, a type
of brown that you would only see on the bark of a young tree,” the
old woman said with tears in her eyes.

“The sun tanned his innocent skin perfectly,
like a melody that a sparrow sings, a snowflake’s beauty that can
never be duplicated. The story has it that his blue eyes were so
special, whenever he would stare at you, it was as if he was
staring at a single grain of sand out of billions, making
everything he looked at feel like it was the only one in the
reflection of his eyes. He was special, and now, since you’ve seen
him, my mission has to begin; the mission of retrieving the reason
why you all are here, and why you all were chosen,” she explained,
pulling out a needle with thread already intact.

“He’s beautiful,” Sam mumbled, seeing her
tears falling onto the cloth. “He’s so very beautiful. He’s like
a–a–a gentle feather, who has been painted in this color I see as
almond brown, but it’s not almond brown.” More of her tears fell
upon Christ’s image, even as the old woman sewed each of the three
pieces together. When she sewed the first piece together, they all
heard a bolt of lightning in the distance, but it didn’t cause
their eyes to leave the image they longed to see. When she sewed
the other piece to form one great Kerchief, the lightning ceased,
and rain began to fall, hard rain, like ice, that pounded against
the roof. Mary turned around and noticed wind blowing against the
old woman’s house, a type of current that grew stronger every time
she inhaled deeper. Mary turned back, and saw that the old woman
held the holy cloth up in the air, like a torch ready to light the
lives of many. But when she held it up high for them to see, the
candles which lit her house blew out, leaving them in darkness.
Michael and David rushed around to find some matches, or else some
other means of light, when suddenly the candles lit themselves, and
in their sight was the garment with Jesus upon it.

“Now, before I allow you to regain your
memories, I have to ask one of you to leave, not because your eyes
aren’t worthy of this memory, but because the Lord told me to do
so,” said the old woman before she put the garment face-down on the
table. “Before I ask the one to leave, I must tell you that you all
are only going to receive the memory of why you’re here, and how
you were chosen for this specific mission. Your full memories will
be regained once the eighth sign has begun. Now, each one has to
touch the Kerchief separately, and that’s how I and you will know
who is the chosen for this memory, and who has to wait for it,” she
explained very carefully, with her voice shaking like a
hummingbird’s wing.

They looked at each other with trepidation in
their stares, hearing the old woman add, “Mary and Sam, you are not
the chosen. It’s between the four young men whom I see before me,
the ones who came here, to my understanding, for a cure to their
supposed sickness.” The old woman giggled a bit at the young men,
and saw Gabriel, Michael, David and Jeremy look at each other in a
shocked fashion; it was as if the one who was not chosen would be
some sort of an outcast to them all. “Gabriel, you touch it first,”
she said just as Gabriel noticed Sam’s tear marks were engraved
right under Jesus’s eyes. He approached the cloth slowly, and stuck
his right hand out, placing his index finger on the Kerchief with
his eyes widening toward its texture. Suddenly a light began
shining on the garment. He shot his hand away immediately. “Now
it’s Michael’s turn.” Michael slowly put his right hand up to the
garment, and the same light appeared, but this time it was
brighter. “David, now you touch it,” she said as Michael pulled his
hand away from it and glanced at David.

“But I already know why we’re here, and why
we were chosen,” David stated, looking at the Kerchief, and then
turning his head to look at the old woman. “My Lord already gave me
the powers also!”

The old woman gave David a look of evil,
demanding, “David, I said touch it. Now!” So David complied with
her wishes, and touched the Kerchief with the ice-like rain still
knocking against the roof. The cloth gave out an even brighter
light than Michael’s, and he took his hand away from it
immediately.

“Alright, Jeremy, your turn,” the old woman
instructed, having Gabriel, Michael and David feeling strange, like
the garment gave them some sort of power that they didn’t know
would come to them. Even David felt something he couldn’t explain,
knowing now that he might be equaled to Michael and Gabriel when it
came to powers and the mission at hand.