Jeremiah Rivers: Demons Inside and Out

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“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” --Book of Jeremiah

PART ONE: September 2013

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Jeremiah Rivers never expected to have a chance to avenge his father’s murder, certainly not twenty-two years after he saw it happen. He had made a promise however, a long time ago, crouched in the dark, huddled against horrors of nature and man, and maybe finally that promise would be kept.

He was in New York City, a long way from where he’d rocketed that promise to the heavens, when he found the antique store. He was walking with little purpose, just needing to be outside and moving, shedding his anguish at the corner of every block, tossing it into the dark of an alley on Eighth Avenue, stuffing it in a homeless man’s inside jacket pocket along with a twenty-dollar bill, jettisoning all that pain so only rage remained, and there it was, a place he hadn’t sought but its discovery stopped his feet.

Scrunched between a .99-Cent Pizza place and one of those ambiguous buildings where a glass door revealed a tired-looking security guard slouched over a desk crammed in the corner, the store humbly invited looky loos with its sign made from tin, faded and warped, an antique itself, whispering its name, Forgotten Artifacts.

This part of New York was called Hell’s Kitchen for some reason and that was almost too-fitting, considering what had brought him out here. He’d stumbled from the mammoth Glass Tower that stood tall over the stretch of green that New Yorkers called “the park.” The view from the top, sixty floors up, made people cross themselves in awe, but when Jeremiah finally went up there, all those trees made him long for a lost place. A place where nature wasn’t boxed-in inside traffic-clogged streets, where such beauty rolled off beyond the horizon. He’d given up that place, however. Even the beauty hadn’t been enough to pull his eyes from the blood in the road, glistening black puddles. He thought he had left his heart there, too, but, miracle or cosmic joke, he found it still beat, though somewhat feebly, and in desperation, he’d opened it again.

And ended up here, standing outside an antique shop on a hot September afternoon, sweat rolling down his neck to wet the collar of his white dress shirt, still snug around his neck, tie wedged up tight. There was some sense to be made of what had happened, but Jeremiah didn’t want to think about it. That’s why he’d walked out of the Glass Tower, what some called the Glass Temple, not to think and plan, but to do exactly otherwise. Walk far enough and, hopefully, out-walk his thoughts.

Completely blacked-out, the door could have been the entrance to any one of the thousands of porn shops sprinkled around the city, and maybe it was, but the rusted gadgets in the small display window would be extremely misleading. Several things congregated in the display, a few identifiable. A life-size bronze statue of a cougar sat in proud feline pose beside one of those ancient record players with the blooming-flower trumpet as the speaker. Various-sized metallic cups intermingled with porcelain china teacups painted with blue butterflies and gold pocket watches, still ticking in defiance of their obsolesce, encircled a sterling-silver candelabra. Along the back wall hung old paintings of dogs mid-chase and well-dressed aristocrats trapped in lost gazes of ennui. Among them dangled a crucifix made of some heavy metal, the Jesus sloping forward, hair obscuring his face, too miserable to look at his executioners.

It was the truest crucifix Jeremiah had ever seen. At least the truest-feeling. What would his father have said about that? Or his grandfather? Amazing how far he had fallen from the family calling. Dad had been a man of intellect who believed religion should value life and seek to improve all things and foster happiness. Faith, for him, had been scholarly. Grandpa, who, when you got right down to it, could be blamed for everything, believed in the sanctity of the Word. In his world-view, the Gospel was gospel, and everything in it really happened. All things were possible with God.

Jeremiah thought he’d stopped believing that twenty-two years ago, but it wasn’t until the black puddles in the street that he really abandoned God. Moonlight reflected in those puddles, shimmering wraiths, insubstantial and indifferent, and that’s what had done it. That and Carlyle Topps, the paramedic with the piss-stained undershirt.