The Wrath of Jeremy (42 page)

A cold, vague breeze came into the church’s
stomach, blowing out some of the candles that gave light to their
eyes, shifting their calmness to a height of trepidation as Jeremy
and Sam heard what David said, and knew his eyes were fixed on the
cross. Sam and Jeremy were too afraid to turn around and follow
David’s stare, yet they did it anyway. First Jeremy turned and then
Sam, looking at the cross in the half-darkened church, forcing
Sam’s emotional state to make her say, “Oh my God!”

A fearful nature took over each of them,
seeing a new man or creature that hung on the holy cross,
resembling the cliché of the Jesus they believed in, hanging there
as if he was dead from torture. It was an actual body, unlike the
statues that are made to look real; this one was a human being. And
for that, it hung gracefully from the cross, with newly made flesh
wounds on his side, feet and forearms; rusted nails penetrated each
of the wounds, and he hung silently in his own painful state. The
cross began to shine, as if it wanted them to look at it, showing
this man not exactly looking like Jesus, but someone else, another
being that wasn’t in their consciousness. Every time the light
shined brighter, each of them would get a better look at the man,
perceiving he had long, black hair, pale white skin with a robe
drenched in blood, and a crown of nails sheathed around his head of
bloody textures.

“Guys, I think that’s…Jastian,” whispered
Jeremy, closing in on the mysterious man’s closed eyes. Alone in
the church, each of them gawked at this creature of torture when
suddenly the eyes opened on the man who hung from the crucifix,
and, once they did, Sam screamed so loud that she coughed up blood,
still yelling in the process. The church started to shiver,
trembling its body, vibrating its interior soul. Sam tried to catch
her breath from her bloody coughs, wanting to scream again from the
church’s nervous shaking. Candles started to fall, burning out from
their massive drop, and statues began to break apart as the man on
the cross pulled his hands and feet away from it, causing them to
tear due to the nails that forced them to stay down like glue. On
the altar’s table, Jeremy, Sam and David stood and watched in
fright, a magnitude of nerves that choked their breath, inhaling
this man’s evil that caused them to gasp for air, craving to escape
this sight of sinister menace. Ripping his skin from the cross,
Jeremy, Sam and David watched this man’s blood fall on them like a
rain squall, a storm that splashed at their frozen flesh, and their
eyes shut with force, not having any urge to see any more of this
fear-provoking sight. In the distance, through the rickety church
and windy momentum of air, stood three single candles that still
were burning, and they prayed that the candles wouldn’t die,
yearned for the nostalgic darkness that wanted to come never to
show itself.

“You shall not end what I don’t want to be
destroyed,” the man spoke in a massive echo. Jeremy, Sam and David
jumped off the altar’s table right when this man, a creature of a
spiritual realm, stepped down from the cross, standing tall on the
altar with his enthralling face shining out radiance so bright that
Jeremy, Sam and David couldn’t make out the creature’s image.

The three candles in the distance blew out,
yet the brightness from this man took over the flames’ place. He
was so radiant that Sam’s eyes began to water, stinging like salt
was being poured into them. “Who are you?” yelled Jeremy through
the pulsating light that the creature gave.

The man, or spirit, gaped at Jeremy’s eyes of
tear-filled brown, answering, “I’m the second light, the second
light that is known as an angel. I am Jastian, the Father of God!”
Jastian’s arms hastily turned into snakes, large anacondas that
stared at the three of them with their long, sharp, sultry tongues.
Suddenly his entire body shot out snakes from it, and they hung
from his pale, half-bloody flesh, and their venom-filled teeth
tried to cut through Jeremy’s tissue that was soft and fragile from
all the perspiration.

“If you are Jastian, then why do you show
serpents for arms?” Sam screamed. Jastian stared at her and paused
his snakes for a moment, watching her tears falling from her
terrified eyes of beauty, smiling toward her fright. It was as if
he was amused by her terror, a dogmatic, conniving, immortal
creature with a fetish for serpents.

“Because your vicious acts show my eyes that
you are evil, just like the serpents I wear. You boys were born by
the saints, and now you will die by the saints,” roared Jastian.
Unexpectedly, silence took over the church, with the trembling
stopping and the serpents still pausing from their killing nature.
A loud knocking boom was heard, and each of them turned around and
faced the aisle of the church. There, to the right and left of the
pews, were the statues of saints, opening their eyes. Sam started
crying and yelling at the sight of a statue in front of her as it
moved about and gazed at her beauty with a look of desire for
carnage and butchery. She backed up so much that her body came into
contact with another statue that was directly behind her, and it
reached out for her, grabbing onto her shirt with its hand made of
rusted stone. She moved her head around and saw the statue’s eyes
bulging out toward her, blood coming out from its sockets, forcing
its eyes to appear even more.

She began screaming and pulled away, tearing
her shirt and leaving the small piece in the statue’s marble hand.
The other statue, which she saw first, released its hands from the
same spot in which it was made, and grabbed onto her arms firmly,
squeezing her flesh hard, brushing them while still holding on.
“This isn’t real. Saints would not do this!” she yelled. Her tears
fell to the altar floor, enthralled in the grip of the statue.
Feeling the church begin to shake once again, her tears fell
quicker to this sight, trembling down her fragile image with shock
shooting into her spine like a blade. In the distance, which held
many other statues, they detected them all moving out from the
position they were sculpted in, and heading straight for the altar,
straight for them, holding a kind of strange, sinister look to
their eyes of black rock.

“These are not saints. My angels have
possessed the statues you see before you. You allowed Jesus to
leave the cross, and therefore you’ve allowed his spirit also to
depart everything that is considered holy. My angels are unlike the
angels you interpret in the half-fabricated existence you mortals
call ‘the Bible of life’. My angels are evil, but only depraved to
the ones in which the evil shines on. All of you hold malevolence,
and you shall not obliterate this land, this place, this mass
called ‘earth’. You shall be stopped.” Jastian chuckled; he laughed
at how Sam fought to release the statue’s hands from her arms by
biting it.

Wind began to form again, and Jastian started
to rise off the ground and levitate in the consecrated air with his
serpents slithering around his body, keeping their green and red
eyes on David and Jeremy.

“Why are we evil? Your son? Your son, our
God, was the one who wanted us to destroy this land. We only listen
to God’s words. You’re not our God, and therefore we shall fight
for our promise that we made to him,” hollered Jeremy. His words
infuriated Jastian, so he shot a snake from his body, and it soared
through the air, squealing and slithering before it hit Jeremy’s
arm. The venomous teeth of the serpent broke through his skin,
stabbed into his bone and pulled him toward Jastian’s body, just
like a rag doll. Jeremy’s skin started ripping with the serpent
lifting him upward toward Jastian’s glowing body. Screams shot out
from Jeremy’s mouth, due to the pain from the serpent stinging at
his flesh, bleeding down to his bones; it was too much for him to
hold in. Jeremy came close enough to see through the light that
shined off of Jastian’s face, and that’s when he screamed even
more; not from the pain either. There, on Jastian’s face, Jeremy
saw the beast, with long, curly, yellow horns that formed from its
head and the beast’s face that held wrinkles that seemed like a
labyrinth to Jeremy’s sight.

“You’re not Jastian, you’re the Devil!”
Jeremy screamed.

The beast began laughing at him and showed
its long, narrow teeth that dripped pus and slime from it. Jastian
shouted in laughter, “No, Jeremy, you are seeing your own
reflection!”

Jeremy cried and saw the same tears that he
shed falling from the beast’s eyes, and the same reaction of terror
he made was made from the beast.

“My son made a promise to the populace of
this earth that he would never dare to destroy this land again. But
through his mystification of the evil that you made on this earth,
my son wanted to destroy it. And then he sent for you, Michael,
David and Gabriel to break the solemn promise, the vow he made.
Through it, you all agreed to his covenant, and were reborn to a
mortal form, only to eradicate the earth on the eighteenth year of
your lives!” Jastian’s anger was great, so mammoth that the skin on
Jeremy’s arm began to rip open more as the serpent’s teeth squeezed
harder from Jastian’s rage. “I love my son, my slave, your God, and
he holds great admiration for me. But I will not allow him to have
you deliver his wrath. The fury will come one day, but not now. I
am the creator of the angels you see in Heaven, as God, my son, is
the creator of humans. I created you angels through my own image,
as God has created humans through his, and everything you see. What
you see before you is your own image, and I will not allow this
image to deliver the wrath!”

Sam released herself from the statue’s grip
and ran up to David, holding him while she cried for Jeremy’s
safety. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, and whatever truth you
may hold, there is only one God to me, and that is not you.
Besides, how are you going to stop us then?” Jeremy screamed; he
felt the wind blowing harder in the church of trepidation.

Jastian’s right serpent hand pointed its
slithering body to the face of a clock that hung on the cathedral’s
walls, answering, “Such a simple question, and such a very simple
reply for it!” Jeremy looked at the clock, focusing on the hands of
it circling in a fast motion. “It is now December nineteenth, and
every breath you take means another will pass. When the clock
strikes twelve, and it strikes it on the twenty-fifth, I will
deliver my own wrath!” Sam and David walked gradually down the
aisle of the church and headed toward the door. They tried not to
move too quickly and take a chance of Jastian or his serpents
seeing them.

“What wrath is that?” retorted Jeremy.

“The wrath of you, Jeremy. I will send you
back to where you fell and the conveyance of Michael, David and
Gabriel to where they came from, Heaven. But, Jeremy, or should I
say, ‘Lucifer’, you won’t be going to Ecstasy; you’ll be going to
your own sinister bliss,” Jastian said.

David and Sam reached the doors that were
still moving from the mob outside, and tried to open them without
making a sound, but the wind within the church caused the entrance
to stay sealed, lifting its momentum to the speed of a twister.
Suddenly the doors formed into fire and burned Sam and David’s
hands. But through their screams and pain, they kept on trying to
open the doors, panicking, craving to have them open, crying from
their scorching hands, begging to God for help in their
struggle.

Finally, the doors released and unfastened,
and in poured the protestors, bringing their rhythm of
antagonism-like rage to a standstill at Sam and David’s bodies,
pausing for a moment to see what they shouldn’t see. There, past
Sam and David, down the aisle of moving statues, and burnt-out
white candles that lay cracked on the red carpet, they looked
inside of the church at Jastian dropping Jeremy to the altar.

“How dare you expose me to other sinners!”
Jastian yelled out.

Without a moment for the protestors to blink
or contemplate what was happening, they all commenced to burn up,
combusting inside to the out, with screams in their excruciating
throbbing, causing Sam to scream. David grabbed her hand and guided
her down the aisle again, away from the smoldering flesh that
baked, suppurating in the echoes of the flames. They dodged the
statues and came up to Jeremy. Pain was still familiar to their
emotions, and they helped him up, not grasping that the clock’s
hands stopped spiraling. Jastian, still being in shock from the mob
seeing his presence, didn’t notice that David, Sam and Jeremy ran
to the back room of the church. All he cared about was pointing his
eyes toward the burning protestors, making sure that their eyes
burnt as well as their memories of him. Once his eyes noticed the
cathedral ruptured into flames, Jastian shot a serpent from his
body, as thick as a wise oak tree with infinite height, and it
followed Jeremy, Michael and Sam, hunting them, making a growling
noise that predominated its echo through the inferno of sin. “You
shall not deliver it, you shall not ever deliver it!” shrieked
Jastian.

Through the back of the church they ran,
first through a hallway with doors that stretched down its long
length, not turning their heads once, only keeping up their stride.
Suddenly David came across a door that read “STAIRWELL”.

“Wait a second, where does this lead to?” Sam
panicked while David opened the door.

“To the basement, and then to the sewer
system,” David replied. Then his eyes went past Sam and saw the
long serpent approaching them, coiling its body and stretching its
slimy length through the hallway.

“But the sewers are flooded from the rain,”
said Jeremy in a frantic fashion. With no time to think, David and
Sam entered first, and then Jeremy, but his dirty shoelace got
caught on a rusted nail that was just inside the door. Panicking,
Jeremy saw the serpent coming nearer to his eyes, breathing in the
serpent’s rage, and feeling the serpent’s body heat. He knew he was
about to be killed, harmed, tormented or mangled, so Jeremy rushed
and tried his hardest to pull his shoelace off of the nail.
Inhaling and exhaling, choking from his breaths coming so fast,
Jeremy saw that the serpent was right up to his nostrils, or
almost. Coming with great force and speed, the serpent caught sight
of Jeremy’s eyes, drained his hope and flushed fear into Jeremy’s
mind.