The Holy Terror Read online

  The Holy Terror

  By Wayne Allen Sallee

  Copyright © 1992 Wayne Allen Salle

  Introduction © 2008 Brian Hodge

  Foreword © 2008 Wayne Allen Salle

  First Digital Edition

  Copyright 2010 Wayne Allen Sallee & Crossroad Press

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  Acknowledgements

  Dedication:

  To everyone who has ever learned to survive this city, and who tried their best to meet its madness on their own terms.

  Also, to Greg and Darcie Loudon, and their children, Ava, Quinn, and Luc. When they tire of their father’s tales of the crazy guy in all those illustrations, they might choose to pick up this book, and then it will all make some sense. Except the part where their father remained my closest friend to the very end.

  In memory of my namesake, Wayne Henley, who passed away in Madisonville, Kentucky, on July 22nd 2007. I’ll always cherish his tales about my parents, Jim and Dolores, and their antics on Willard Court.

  SATURDAY, MARCH 18th, 1989: TATTERED MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY

  By Wayne Allen Sallee

  I was history. For eighteen minutes, I was gone, away from this place, my subconscious looking for the Faceless One so I could wave and say “Hey, there’s my ride!” But I couldn’t wave if I wanted. While I was unconscious, three contusions in my head, both bones in my left forearm twisted through two layers of clothing and a padded winter jacket. I get sick to my stomach thinking about waking up from that nightscape and feeling fire on an icy street, the Pakistani guy from the corner store repeating over and over “Not to touch! Not to touch!” It is an amazing feeling to see your own fist in your jaw because you suddenly have an extra joint in your arm. I knocked out three of my teeth with my fist in the split-second before it turned to putty.

  There is a history to this book. If you want to know more about the accident itself, there are other places to read about it, but I’d like this foreword to be unique, talking about the novel before you and not about my recovery. I want to try and explain why the book came out in 1992 but took place during the winter of 1988-1989. Twenty years ago since the Painkiller came into my head. And lived there for a long, long time.

  For the first year or so after this novel was published (the book debuted at the second World Horror Convention in Nashville), those who knew my story often asked me to sign my name, or make an asterisk, midway down page 243, as it was in my typed manuscript. A scene where two cops are talking with an old woman on Mohawk Street while Barney Miller reruns blare in the background.

  That page sat in my Smith-Corona word processor for thirty-eight days, gathering a thick line of dust. Because of the contusions, I could not have my arm operated on until the daily MRIs showed that I would not explode or bleed out or whatever the doctors thought might happen would happen, and for several weeks, my left hand would not move. Most of you know–and if you don’t, I’m sure the information is somewhere in the Googleverse–that I’ve had cerebral palsy on my right side since birth. My right hand is useless, my right eye a novelty. For those days I lay in Holy Cross Hospital, sharing the room at times with drunk drivers, drugged up mothers with a dozen kids, and a dead Lithuanian with no one to claim the body, I was a puppet with broken strings. I had to be fed. I had to be bathed. My chin wiped after I spilled from my sippy cup of the damned. You really don’t want to know how I urinated into the plastic jug, though to this day I recall the confidence brought on by my ingenuity.

  It was 291 days before I could even move my hand, the last of seven casts coming off and freeing me, my palm wiped clean of love lines and life lines, smooth as a mannequin and the fingers and thumb that came with said store window display. For months after, my thumb and forefinger were taut, my other fingers curled inward. I was either pointing a gun or accusing my Higher Power for letting me live. When I was in the blackness that March 18, 1989 brought to me, I saw David Janssen– the Fugitive, of all people–stopping me from coming towards him, assuring me that it was not time yet. Then again, seeing Dr. Richard Kimble made sense, as he was always chasing after the one-armed man who killed his wife. I still can only use one finger to type, and have back and neck pain from that year with the weighted casts. I have the broken metal plates and screws in a small dish and the x-rays of my skull, which I obtained on the sly. It has taken me just under an hour to type this, wishing this wasn’t the dead of winter howling outside, because it is now that I have werewolf claws and a giant pain grin of quiet determination.

  There are many people that I am indebted to over these past fifteen years, particularly Yvonne Navarro and Janet Winkler, who took much of their precious time away from their writing and teaching, respectively, to transcribe passages of the book after hearing my Demerol-induced words on one of those old-timey cassette recorders. Peggy Nadramia and Peter Gilmore, who edited GRUE magazine, read a short story I sent them called “The Holy Terror” and rejected it, telling me that this should be my first novel. Jeff VanderMeer ran the first chapters of the book in JABBERWOCKY, with another section appearing in Mark V. Zeising’s HOUSE MONKEY. Further inspiration came from Dennis Etchison, Joe R. Lansdale, and Steve Rasnic Tem, along with the late Karl Edward Wagner and J. N. Williamson, who encouraged me to write a first novel before I barely had a half-dozen stories in print. Along the way, Elizabeth Massie, Jeff Johnston, Joan VanderPutten, Kathleen Jurgens, Robert “Bayou Bob” Petitt and Sid Williams read pages and saw that I did not stray from the subject at hand.

  The biggest thanks, in the here and now, is to Brian Hodge, who read the book years ago and wrote the introduction for the anniversary edition (also included in this digital edition). I can bet that some of you are reading this because Brian’s name appears in the bold print it deserves on the cover. Hopefully publisher Gilbert Schloss will let me slip this in, ( Editor's note: He did, and I have included it here as well) that everyone not familiar with Brian’s work immediately go out (well go online, because that’s what everyone does now, right?) and buy MAD DOGS or WILD HORSES, and about eight other novels from the previous century. *

  Much of the six block area of downtown Chicago described in my book is long gone, now there are condos where several buildings were once havens for the homeless, and vacant lots where my make-believe bar Nolan Void and St. Sixtus stood. High rise garages where the Trailways terminal provided the Painkiller with a temporary hiding place and, hell, even Dudley’s Carry-Outs, the best damn hot dog place in the city, is gone. Even the vacant lot between the Burger King and the Fine Arts Theater that “became” the Marclinn Home is now a partly-empty piece of ugly girders, supposedly which will one day house the CBS studios.

  But they remain here in the pages of THE HOLY TERROR, circa our frigid winter of 1988-1989. The ghosts are still there, in yet another cold and dismal winter, paid forward twenty years in shards and tatters.

  Your chattel,

  Wayne Allen Sallee Burbank, Illinois 17 February 2008

  * Editor's Note – the text for this edition has been recovered from a scan of the original book modified for the 15th anniversary edition. I'd like to (proudly) note that author Brian Hodge will join us here at Crossroad Press eventually as well as several others mentioned in the above foreword. All of us loved "The Holy Terror" - DNW

  When a Prognosis is Just the Beginning
>
  Brian Hodge

  If novels—the physical books themselves—could be made more interactive, in poetic and appropriate ways, then the pages of The Holy Terror would fade to blank white soon after you read them. Not because they shouldn’t be preserved, but because this would echo one of the book’s central concerns.

  The Holy Terror is a novel about invisible people.

  Not the type of invisibility you see in movies, with seemingly empty suits of clothes bobbing along of their own volition, or footprints magically appearing across wet sand or dry floors.

  No, these are people rendered invisible by nearly everyone else around them.

  Unless you live in the smallest of small towns and have never left, you’ve almost certainly seen the people portrayed in these pages. You may also have pretended not to. Maybe they held out a cup, for the thousandth time that day, in hopes that you would drop some currency or coins into it. Maybe they were in a wheelchair. Maybe they weren’t, but walked funny. Or carried on conversations with partners you couldn’t see. Or maybe they did nothing to announce it overtly, but you still picked up a vibe that something was just a little different there.

  And in that moment they became invisible, in a far more fundamental way than affects those with whom we engage in run-of-the-mill avoidance of eye contact on city streets. We quicken our step and walk on by as if they’re just. Not. There.

  No judgments here. I do it too, and feel rather shamed by the admission.

  I’m compelled to wonder why, exactly, we do it, although I can only rely on guesswork. It isn’t the sort of thing for which pollsters conduct surveys.

  On the surface, there’s undoubtedly our resistance to a stranger, any stranger, who wants something from us, or merely has the potential to want something from us. Because that first innocuous request may only be the foot in the door: a quarter first, perhaps a piece of our soul next.

  Better, then, to be wary.

  But when we’re confronted with someone who is plainly broken, it goes deeper. We are confronted with something we can’t fix, and we hate that. We are met with pain we can’t assuage, and that makes us feel inadequate. We are witness to proof of chaos, manifested in an accident of physics or biology gone haywire, and the only thing worse than pondering ill will behind it is acknowledging that physics and biology don’t care about us in the first place. They govern life while disregarding the individual.

  Things can fall apart; the center will not always hold.

  It could happen to us, and being reminded is uncomfortable.

  Better, then, not to see the messenger at all.

  * * *

  I don’t know when Wayne Allen Sallee stopped pretending not to see, if he ever pretended in the first place. I suspect he didn’t. You get the feeling reading The Holy Terror that most of its characters, both central and peripheral, come from people he’s known, talked with at length, met once, or exchanged a few quick words with without ever getting a name, and that he saw each one of them, up close, without ever looking away.

  In describing them he uses language that may come as a surprise. Handicapped. Cripples. More. The novel was written and first published before such cringeworthy terms as differently-abled and challenged and, perhaps worst of all, handicapable, were injected into the lexicon, as if to soften the words would somehow mitigate the reality. Sallee could edit the original language if he wished—that’s easy to do with a book’s new edition—but why would he want to?

  Nothing that matters has changed.

  And writers are entitled to use the words that feel most honest.

  I’ve been wrestling for a while with how much to mention here. There’s a factor that shouldn’t be ignored, or hurriedly glossed over, but neither should it take central spotlight:

  When it comes to handicaps and crippling conditions, Wayne Allen Sallee knows what he’s talking about, all too well. His brain hemorrhaged when he was born and left him with the lifetime souvenir of cerebral palsy. Not long after I first got to know him, roughly twenty years ago, he was struck by a car and catapulted into the side of a Chicago Transit Authority bus. He’s been through more operations and procedures and endured more pain than any random handful of other people I know. From both near and far I’ve seen him contend with it all with gallows humor, stubborn willpower, and a tenacious refusal to let self-pity and anger take control; instead, he transmutes and channels them into more constructive outlets. His work varies, like that of all writers who keep at it for the right reasons—sometimes a scream, sometimes a flipped middle finger, sometimes a dissection—but it’s typically characterized by an empathy unusual in its depth, especially for fiction falling under the horror rubric.

  In The Holy Terror, then, you will find a novel that was written straight from the heart, as many novels are, but as few can be. Its characters, many of them street people, and most in wheelchairs or otherwise in bodies that don’t work properly—“a prisoner of war to one’s own body,” in the novel’s words—are not exalted as noble role (or roll) models, dealing with whatever ails them with saintly stoicism. Neither are they the caricatures that might have resulted from a writer who didn’t understand what the world looks like through their eyes.

  Instead, they’re just likeable, fallible, brave, and sometimes even ludicrous human beings, making their way with humor and bitterness and determination and sorrow and an occasional touch of grace, and always looking out for each other. Because they’re the ones best equipped to do it.

  And they surely need to, now more than ever.

  Because preying on Chicago’s population of disabled street people is the Painkiller, a serial murderer the likes of which you haven’t seen before. His methods are unique, and so is what compels him. He believes it to be God, and without a doubt he’s been touched by something, but there’s room enough here to make up your own mind. Just as valid an explanation is the alternative pantheon, the Givers of Pain and Rapture, imagined by the novel’s main conscience, Vic Tremble.

  When I first read The Holy Terror, in 1992, I’d never heard of Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as “the hugging saint,” and who has by now embraced roughly 30 million people around the world. I’ve been brought to tears by stories of some of the people she’s welcomed into her arms, people whom you can imagine haven’t been touched by another human being in years.

  But I thought of her while rereading the novel the other day. It struck me that Amma’s simple mission of love and unconditional acceptance and truly seeing whoever approaches her is one of the purest affirmations of life I’ve ever heard of…

  And that the mission of the Painkiller is its inverse, with death coming not from animosity, but from a grotesquely mutated form of compassion.

  * * *

  The same day I began rereading The Holy Terror, I saw an article on ABC News’ web site about Huang Chuancai, a 32-year-old man in China undergoing treatment for neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that caused him to develop 50 pounds of facial tumors. Several photos supplemented the article, and drove home the severity of Huang’s condition as newsroom prose couldn’t. Imagine a large, heavy, sandbag made of skin draped over a skull and loosely molded with human features.

  His hands, though, were exquisite, the hands of a pianist, or the hands of Yo-Yo Ma, photographed in repose against his cello. Even here, in a man whose disfigurement is believed to be the worst of its kind in the world, there was beauty, if you could see it.

  Some did. In the Comments section, most people were kind. A few tiny minds couldn’t resist making jokes. But most were deeply kind, offering words of compassion and wishes for the success of his treatments that Huang Chuancai will probably never see, although I like to think that something gets through to him.

  One comment stuck with me, although perhaps not for the obvious reasons: I believe people like this man are a test for the rest of us, to see if we are cruel or kind in our hearts.

  It stuck with me, unnervingly so, because a test implies someone who giv
es it.

  Someone who grades.

  Those who pass and those who fail.

  Most of all, it implies that someone else has been picked to be that test, whether by accident or design, through physics or biology, or even by Givers of Pain and Rapture.

  And if you’re brave enough, or compassionate enough, or cruel enough to wonder what that must be like, keep reading. You’re about to walk in those shoes, with someone who knows the way.

  Brian Hodge Boulder, CO January 2008

  The First And Last St. Vitus Dance

  Chicago's Near North Side:

  Friday 1 December, 1958

  They had been snickering in the back row of the classroom, prematurely dismissing Sister Kara Veronica’s readings of the class’s Good Samaritan compositions in favor of discussing whether or not you’d be able to pick your nose if your hand didn’t have any bones in it, when the fire that killed ninety-five children and three nuns broke out. It was 2:37 in the afternoon.

  The sixth grade’s homework assignment the night before had been to write three hundred words on a Good Samaritan story of their own; the three boys in the last row had listened to the first story only because one of the three, Frankie Haid, had been the author. The black-haired boy who had a face still rounded by baby fat and squinty blue eyes set into sockets like horizontal thumbprints would always have a way with words.

  Especially when it came to bastardizing Bible stories.

  His composition, meticulously printed onto pale tan foolscap paper, the loops of his small e’s and a’s properly touching the forest green dotted-line that ran halfway between the solid lines, was the usual classic. The parochial school had discontinued purchasing that type of foolscap a year earlier, but several of St. Vitus’ nuns would not think of ordering new supplies until the old were depleted.

  Jim McCoppin and Freddy Gorshin had never doubted their friend’s ability. They both had gassed it up as the penguin read Haid’s little gem. What it was, this Samaritan helps this kid, a real holy terror in the neighborhood, who cracks up on his Schwinn, but only after some greaser makes book with the prone kid’s record box filled with 45s of labeled-by-the-penguin JD’s like Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry.