The Holy Terror by Wayne Allen Sallee Read Free Book Online

polio vaccine, the other to knife eight nurses to death in their dorm. A small number of cooling bodies, to be sure. But not to the families. Only to the Hitlers and Khadafys, of which Our Lord Quote Unquote has provided us with many.
    I tend to place my beliefs in gods I refer to as The Givers of Pain and Rapture. Lesser gods. I do not pray selfishly. I pray that those lesser gods use my body as a vessel so that I can dissipate pain throughout me.
    I’ll never pray for my own sake.
    The most excruciating pain I have ever caused myself was an incident that occurred just over a decade ago. I had been staying with a friend up on Sheridan and Cuyler. It happened in the bathroom. I just wanted to know how it would feel. Naked after a shower, still wet, my balls were shriveled.
    I opened the wicker hamper opposite the sink and let my penis and testicles droop over the edge. I gently lowered the lid and applied pressure against the top with my hands. My pubic hair was stretched taut in places. Still pressing downward, I then proceeded to pull my dick through the tiny crack, keeping the lid as tightly closed as possible.
    It was like clenching your teeth and pushing your tongue through the cracks. Your tongue looks bloodless and it was like that with my penis. I almost panicked when I thought about my sac splitting open and my nuts bouncing down to the bottom of the hamper onto my friend’s boxers. Explain that one.
    The right testicle was bruised for several weeks. But at least I knew what it felt like. The Givers of Pain and Rapture would certainly understand. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to see the rapture.
    I wonder what it would feel like to put a bone saw against my cheekbone? Would I be blinded by bone chips? Which would I feel most, the agony of sudden blindness or that of the saw cutting downward into my jaw?
    Is it really any wonder that I will never pray for my own sake?

    * * *

    Tremulis closed the book and checked his watch. He’d picked himself up a job at the Hard Rock Cafe that past summer; sure, it was only washing the glasses and straightening chairs, but at least it sounded good when you said you worked in a club. And he liked guessing the kind of girl by her lipstick stains or cigarette stubs. Himself, he liked the kind of girl who didn’t rely on the crutches of makeup and or smoking. Not that he had so much as kissed somebody who was outside of his immediate family in the last year.
    He came from a close-knit Polish family; Mother Tremulis’s parents coming from some obscure town in the Carpathian Mountains, moving first to Relling, Pennsylvania in the thirties, and on to Division Street— Polish Broadway—in 1947. Diedre - Tremulis did not like the idea of “Wiktor” working at a bar. She’d been a dice girl at the Orange Lantern on Wolcott, and often had stories of those days. Her only child couldn’t get her to understand that the corruptions were a bit different these days. And he was glad for the time it kept him away from home.
    He backtracked east. The cafe was on the corner of Dearborn and Ontario, and he had about ten minutes to walk there.

Chapter Four

    It hit him like a hammer in the gut. Gorshin had used to make wild, unexpected swings at him back at St. Vitus. The kid was small and there was no power to the punch. Yet Haid would double over and expel most every molecule of air inside him. It was like that now.
    He had felt more than a little shaky after the incident back on Couch Street, like the adrenaline pump he’d experience after receiving cortisone shots in his back. Like his body was fighting new antibodies, something like that.
    A hammer in the gut. He hurt so bad that he had stopped questioning Father on why he hadn’t explained to him that this was going to hurt so bad. This cleansing ritual, this act of contrition, whatever. For chrissakes, Father had never said it would hurt like this.
    Stumbling, one foot over another. Someone who looked like he had run the good