Read Online The Wrath of Jeremy by Stephen Andrew Salamon - Free Book Online Page B

was the cue to take Gabriel away.
    He pushed the wheelchair to face the large
doorway that entered the stomach of the institution. Gabriel’s
fears worsened and the draft of cold wind grew stronger. As Gabriel
passed through the foyer of the institution, he looked back at his
mother, not realizing this moment would be the last time he would
see her for a very long time, and smiled toward her worried face,
wanting her to know that he was fine, but yet he wasn’t. He didn’t
want her to worry. They strolled through a corridor that led to a
door of metal, and Gabriel saw that it had five large, rusted locks
in its body, that all dripped some form of water. The drops ran
past the rust on the locks that turned the water to brown as
Gabriel followed them, dropping to the floor, where a large puddle
of rusted water stood. Gabriel then looked up at the ceiling in
front of the metal door and saw water dripping from it, knowing now
that that was where the water came from as it seeped down the
doorway.
    Gabriel watched as the large man opened each
lock one by one, with a smile on his ugly face growing with each
lock. He finally unlocked the last lock and a form of laugh or
giggle came from the man’s mouth, but Gabriel wasn’t sure what it
was, so he stayed silent in his wheelchair and waited for the man
to open the door. Once opened, he wheeled Gabriel through it. Now
that he was on the other side of the door, Gabriel noticed the
walls weren’t white anymore but gray, sinister gray with cracks at
every end from aging. To Gabriel, the sounds that he felt weren’t
sounds that he liked once entering this new interior.
    In Gabriel’s mind, his sounds aren’t sounds
but feelings. When entering a garden, for instance, he hears the
sense of fairies or birds, singing and dancing in the clouds of
immense cotton, with angels shooting by the large flowers and
singing a chorus to their beauty. When entering a dark room such as
this, his subconscious felt the sounds of monsters, fiends, or
death scaring the life out of innocence, only catering to his
fright even more.
    But this room’s feeling was different; he
never felt the sounds that he experienced now. The gray walls, the
textures of his smells, made him feel the sounds of demons flying
about, laughing toward him, showing themselves to his ears. So
Gabriel shut his eyes for a moment to make his imagination go away;
it didn’t.
    Once the large man locked the door behind
them, Gabriel’s confusion grew and the strong aroma of urine that
reached his nose came to him and upset his stomach. Gabriel then
questioned the man, “Why does it smell like piss, and why does it
look so shitty here?”
    The man stopped wheeling Gabriel any deeper
into the hallways of Grewsal, and got in front of the chair to have
perfect eye contact with Gabriel’s fears. He stopped the chair
right under a dimmed light bulb, which like the locks on the door
were also leaking water that made a puddle on the ground. The man
smiled at Gabriel, and suddenly his face was filled with rage, and
he shouted, “Shut up!”
    Gabriel was appalled at the nurse’s rudeness:
being that he was a patient, he felt that the man should never
raise his voice to him. So Gabriel spoke up in defense, as he
snarled and rolled his eyes toward the man’s fat, sweaty face.
“Excuse me, but I happen to be a patient here! I’m gonna tell my
mother if you—”
    The man interrupted him. “Listen, you
sonofabitch, if you speak one more time, I’ll beat the shit out of
you so bad that your sickness will look like a cure compared to the
way your face will look!” The man then slapped Gabriel’s head and
started to push the wheelchair down the hallway again. As Gabriel
sat in the chair with the urine-like smell baking his nostril hairs
due to the high heat that came as they entered deeper into Grewsal,
Gabriel’s bafflement grew as to why this man was acting like this.
He wasn’t afraid of the man, but he felt somewhat inferior to