The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  “All the serial killers I’ve ever read about had about as much money as I do in my pocket now,” Tremble said after thinking about it a moment. He strained his eyes in the dim red light to see if anyone had carved their initials into the wooden railing. Or even their beliefs.

  “There are exceptions,” the Dream said on the third stair. “Gacy made money from his construction business. And Christopher Wilder paid cash on his cross-country murder spree.”

  Tremble did remember the balding man who chewed his nails to the quick and met his end in a gas station in New Hampshire.

  “Exceptions,” he agreed.

  And Gacy’s construction knowledge taught him how to dig with a shovel and pour cement, Tremble thought as they climbed upwards. What was John Wayne Gacy’s favorite country and western song? “I’m Walking The Floor Over You.” Tremble, you cutup, you.

  They reached the second floor landing. The harsh glow from behind slatted blinds was brighter than a softer light from a third story window. A blue light wavered, and Tremble realized it was probably a television.

  With the muted sounds of evening around them, the Dream said to the darkness, “Well, here we are.” The way he announced it, Tremble thought of a car pulled over into a Lover’s Lane and the lights of the city were laid out beneath them. While he pondered what it would be like to own a body that would allow him to drive a car, as well as permit him to touch a woman sensually in said car, spasm-free, he saw the American Dream staring at the darkness that loomed above them.

  Not at the January sky, bruised purple and black, the light from the nearest stars barely making it through the pollution. The darkness, the American Dream knew, was a call girl who went by the name of Lullaby and Goodnight, with reasoning behind the usage of dual names being the darkest sky of all.

  A woman with a young girl’s mind, who never spoke but mewled at all the right times, and who charged, rather Mama Tomei charged, upwards of five thousand dollars for the ultimate one night stand. The highest salaried men came to this dilapidated two-flat on North Mohawk, the turks of Chicago come to kill or mutilate the prostitute as she orgasmed, then return the following week to repeat the act. Mama Tomei took Visa, Mastercard, and Amex for the act itself. Most of the money might be needed for plastic surgery or bone reconstruction.

  The ultimate one-night stand. The American Dream thought long and hard on that. Realizing that suicide came in a weak second to what was experienced here.

  The velcro on his wrist braces whispered against the wooden railings, reminding Tremble of panty hose being slipped off of a woman he never loved, and then the masked man knocked on the door, twice, paused a heartbeat, and knocked twice again. Tremble wondered if it was a secret password or if the Dream’s arm had simply weakened while rapping.

  The porch was enclosed on two sides; Tremble saw a swing near the north end of the landing, a strip of curled flypaper matted to the wire mesh behind it. Magazines were strewn around the well-swept flooring. He wondered if they were skin magazines, or, from what little he’d been told of the expected clientele, recent copies of U.S. News & World Report.

  He looked over at Evan Shustak. The American Dream, who, as a way of life, catalogued things neatly in the separate prison cells of his brain, seemed not to care about the outer details of this place. These past weeks, since Mike Surfer’s disappearance and presumed death at the hands of the Painkiller, the only thing on his mind was the murderer’s capture. As they waited for a response to the knock, Tremble imagined a scenario involving an eye slit being pulled back from the door like at the El Rukn Headquarters on Drexel Blvd.

  The door opened quietly. A woman so frail she made the Dream look like a television wrestler was framed in the kitchen light. One of those overhead jobs with two concentric rings of white light. She was five feet two, at best. Tremble had expected, hell...he just didn’t know anymore. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing “She loves me, she loves me not,” with a dead rodent might arch his brows.

  “You must be Evan,” the woman beamed, her accent vaguely Polish. Lugan, maybe.

  Tremble still couldn’t get over it. The guy thought he was a superhero, yet everyone and their Auntie Charlotte knew his so-called secret identity. Or maybe they just think they know, himself included, and that was the American Dream’s biggest joke of all.

  “And you must be Vic Tremble,” she took his hand. Their calluses touched. ”I am Mama Tomei. Call me Mama.”

  “The pleasure is mine.” He smelled meat on her breath.

  Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Dracula’s Castle, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into the gutter. A black and white Emerson, its antennae angled towards two o’clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Dietrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.

  “Please,” the woman said, sliding into a chair. “You sit now.”

  ‘“You look as young as ever, living in this city that ages every living thing,” the Dream said as he sat down opposite the television.

  “Evan, you are the kind one.” The woman fluffed napkins in a wooden holder cut into the shape of a blue duck. Her nails had been painted coral, but the color was chipping away on each finger. Tremble sat opposite her, the tablecloth between them a fractal image of pastel shapes.

  “New cologne?” the Dream asked.

  “No,” Mama Tomei said softly. “My daughter... she had a visitor. We hadn’t planned...” she let it trail.

  “Oh,” the Dream simply said. “We didn’t see any cars out front.”

  You ever hear of cabs, Tremble felt like saying then, for absolutely no good reason.

  “Would either of you like some coffee? Mountain Grown, the best kind.” Pushing her chair away from the subject of visitors, she busied herself at the counter.

  Enough of that, Tremble thought, finding new profiles of beige men smoking corn cob pipes in the tablecloth.

  “I thought times like these were made for Taster’s Choice,” he muttered, low enough that the American Dream did not hear him.

  * * *

  All three were on their second cup, with Tremble just finishing up some small talk on a few of the residents at the Rainey Marclinn House. Both he and the American Dream felt that the Painkiller was zeroing in on the residents. When the dismembered corpses were first found back in November, the wheelchair-bound victims were scattered around the South Loop.

  It was then that the American Dream, his mask pulled up over his nose so that he could sip his coffee, brought up the subject of why they had come.

  “I, that is, we think we know who the Painkiller is, as I mentioned when we spoke on the phone yesterday.”

  “Oh, my, yes.” Mama Tomei put her hand to her mouth. Tremble’s own mother Diedre would make the same motion when watching the nightly news, but only to pick at worry beads of scabs while she mouthed silent prayers for Hollywood celebrities or the First Lady’s upcoming thyroid operation.

  “He’s the one been burning them people and cutting them up, such a terrible world we live in.” Tremble would bet dollars to doughnuts that she believed that the weather changes were due to the Apollo moon landing a generation before.

  “I suspect there is more to it than simply cutting and torching the victims,” the Dream slapped his palm onto the table. “I just can’t figure the angle, is all.” His fingers spidered over his mask. Tremble’s forehead throbbed three pulses. He faintly heard the closing horns of the Barney Miller show. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of Hill Street Blues. Mike Surfer had loved cop shows most of all and with this thought Tremble felt a case of projectile vomit coming on as unbidden as pre-ejaculation.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me, Mrs., uh, Mama. I, well, I have to use your bathroom.” He was told that it was the first door on the left, down a darkened hallway. There was
a mirror above the kitchen sink, and, passing it, Tremble saw that the grey hairs on his blond head looked like cobwebs.

  * * *

  Tremble could see that the walls down the length of the hallway were bare, but did not focus on any direction at all for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. He felt blindly for the recess where the bathroom door would be. The floor was carpeted; shadows of branches thrown against the living room bay windows danced to the odd theories of the American Dream, his voice droning on in the kitchen. The guy was grasping at straws, they both were. Maybe they should just let the cops solve it, Rizzi had told them that they were keeping it active whether or not dismembered bodies were found in the wheelchairs or not. The cop didn’t have to add that there was a mayoral special election coming on, in two months.

  And he never was told why it seemed logical for the Painkiller to come here. There were plenty of cheaper places to go, both in the city and out in Cal City or Fallon Ridge. Tremble himself had taken in the go-go palaces of Calumet City several times.

  Finally finding the bathroom, he was still nervous enough that his urine stream split into two separate dribbles. The seat was broken, yellowed tape was wrapped around the pieces. When he was finished, carefully wiping the seat with a tissue he then stuffed in his pants pocket, Tremble opened the door and faced the opposite wall.

  Muted amber light shone at the stairwell landing. He heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.

  It took him but a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.

  Three steps up, he recalled flushing the toilet. He hoped they hadn’t heard.

  Tremble counted twelve steps—it was another of his compulsive-obsessive tendencies, and wasn’t it funny that the American Dream wanted to form a “super-hero” group with that same name?—and turned right at the top of the landing. He found himself face-to-face with a half-dozen of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with, their mournful eyes, lost dogs who stared at you with a gaze that cynical Tremble saw in the woman praying the stations of the cross at St. Sixtus while secretly asking only to win the Lotto.

  He followed the amber light to encounter madness.

  Stepping into the shadow in the L-shaped hallway. But he was still able to see the slice of the room visible to Tremble put the woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. She was nude. Lullaby…and Goodnight. The room itself was immaculate and the woman on the bed, Mama Tomei’s daughter, had a head growing out of her emaciated rib cage.

  Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight. Her face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow’s peak, a crooked nose and a mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.

  A sound from deep within her grimaced mouth told him that someone else was indeed in the room. The grunt was nowhere near what he had heard from the bathroom’s doorway.

  Chicago’s elite paid five thousand?

  The head.

  Because of the head.

  The head, also female, had sparse black hair and rested against Mama Tomei’s daughters’ breasts as though they were pillows. Tremble had a book at home about freaks. There was a photo of a black girl with part of a torso and legs growing out of her abdomen. She had lived to be twenty-six. When the head fell over to rest against her left elbow, Tremble had to fist his mouth to keep from gagging.

  His presence was still unnoticed, though. The eyes, a dull grey, were rolled back into the head, with mostly the whites showing. Even the white was more like a dirty grey. As the head nestled in the crook of the girl’s arm, a faint orange drool dripped from the gaping mouth. It was then that Tremble again heard the sensuous female moan.

  From the portion of the room he could not see, a sleek, tanned form walked over to the foot of the bed. She was totally naked. Of course she was, what the hell was he thinking?

  Mesmerized by her downy thatch and firm breasts, it took him a moment to realize that he recognized the body. From imagining it, imagining her, naked on the evening news. It was the newswoman who was hell-bent on pleading with the Painkiller to stop killing innocent cripples.

  Tremble watched the newswoman, who brought tears to the eyes of some and rating points to her network, finish the task of masturbating. Her thumb and three of her fingers were glistening. She wore the same nail polish as on the television, and her hand moved with the practiced movement of one accustomed to shuffling pages in the public eye.

  When she knelt down between the prone girl’s legs, her eyes hungry, Tremble shut his eyes. He put his hand to his forehead, felt the pulse of the curled vein above his temple on his little finger.

  It was the scream that made him open his eyes again.

  The newscaster’s face had been buried between the girl’s thighs. She grunted a scream in orgasm. The mutated head showed no sign of life, if it ever had.

  Not even when the newswoman grabbed its neck with both hands and throttled it like it was one of those cushioned “stress dolls.”

  Her beautiful, blond, weeknights at five-six-and-ten hair whipping around her, the newswoman’s head bobbed furiously in the deformed girl’s crotch, as if her spine was broken and she could not get up. Her voice was muffled. She might have been cursing an ex-spouse, she could have, been mouthing the television station president’s name in syllables muffled by sweating flesh. Whatever she was saying, her voice rose as she pressed her perfectly-sculpted fingernails under the mutated head’s jawbones. The face quickly purpled. Its drooling had stopped...

  Mama Tomei’s daughter shook her own head from side to side, her eyes squeezed shut in passion or pain.

  The newswoman’s fingers spidered over the lower head as if it held a message in Braille. She pulled down the side of the mouth closest to Tremble, breaking the skin, scratching a red line back to the ear. There was very little blood. What came out was more like a snotty nosebleed.

  With her other hand, she pulled at the thing’s tongue and let it snap back into the mouth. Her fingers then moved across the entire face. Tremble thought again of a blind person, this time reading for emotions.

  The daughter moaned louder, less guttural. The newswoman lifted her head, positioned her thumbs, and her moans became one with the girl’s as she plunged them into the head’s eyes. The tissue ran, down the pale cheeks like runny eggs. Fluid leaked down the head’s cheek and into its ear.

  When the woman humped against the edge of the bed twice and then looked up and breathed a thank you to not the girl, but the mutilated head, Tremble knew that he could take no more.

  * * *

  Frank Haid, their suspected Painkiller, had never come for the favors of Lullaby and Goodnight. Vic Tremble understood fully why the American Dream had thought he might have come. As an act of contrition.

  On the way back to the relative sanity of Armitage Avenue after midnight, the American Dream spoke quietly. “The head was stillborn. That’s why she can charge so much, and why she has to.”

  Tremble stared at the storefront businesses, Natalie’s Hair Salon, a garish “Leinenkugel now on tap!” sign in front of Club Ennui, a flyer in the window bearing the legend Home of the Elviscera, a row of two-flats with either plastic palm trees, crucifixes, or promo photos of Richard

  M. Daley, Jr., in the front windows. Down Wells Street there were more street hustlers and corner cafes. He recalled the newswoman’s face. How many times...?

  “They can do whatever they want to the head,” he heard the American Dream say as they made it to State. “Strangle it, whatever.”

  “They use the johns’ money for plastic surgery and bone reconstruction. The eyes are fake. Fiberglass. Guy named Timpone sends them from New York. Mama Tomei says that, lately, more and more of the johns are going for the eyes.”

  The two men waited in silence for the downtown bus.

  Chapter Forty-Three

&nb
sp; As Haid ascended the stairwell on the southeast side of Grand, between State and Dearborn, the wind gusts were averaging thirty miles per hour, coming off the lake. Near one of the bridges which stitched the Loop with the rest of the city, a film company was shooting a movie about a killer doll, evidently named Chucky, by the way the crowd was chanting. Haid was able to see the spotlights and heat lamps, though the entourage was blocks away.

  He paid no mind to the fictional drama unfolding to the west. And he was not cold. Father’s aura warmed him. As did the long underwear and high school sweater that he wore underneath his suede jacket. The sweater had been Vince Janssen’s, the school had been Peabody, and the legend the younger man had scripted on the back in younger days read HUBBA HUBBA.

  He heard a dog barking, and he wondered if it was a dog that would save everyone from the killer doll. He hadn’t heard mention of an animal in the film when they talked about it on the television. The dog sounds gave him a rush of déjà vu, something slipped out of the old cranial vault.

  Thou shalt have no dog befoul me. A recurring dream-sound. It wasn’t Father’s voice. It wasn’t his own voice, either. He had started hearing that long ago voice a few months ago, when he could still talk to Father face to face.

  After the incident, Haid had tossed the remaining white desipramine capsules off the Flechette Street overpass, letting Dr. Bruinooge’s precious little anti-depressants tumble down to Goose Island like teeth knocked from a young child’s mouth for doing something BAD BAD BAD. And the long ago voice came ba—

  And just like that, he understood. He clapped his hands together like a patient man.

  The fireman from 1958 had whispered to him in intimacy: THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS BEFORE ME.

  The knowledge was exquisite.

  He stopped for a hot dog and can of Just Whistle cola—to which Father a-okayed his pouring a generous amount of Seagram’s V.0., for added warmth, of course—at the Mr. Grand’s Park-N-Eat. Continuing south, he chewed and gulped, watching a sliver of elevated train pass between the buildings on Franklin Street. He passed two Mexicans arguing about a labor dispute.