Chapter Eight
The Pleasure of Pain
The room to which The Reverend led me was larger than I had expected, not quite the same size as the church above, but close.
There were four narrow rows of the same folding chairs we had in the church proper, six across, half of them occupied.
At the front of the room, near the staircase we had descended, was an altar of sorts: a large plywood X, instead of a cross, that seemed to have been constructed like a fan; it looked like it could rotate 360◦ in any direction, spinning around like a Ferris wheel, flipping top to bottom and back again; at four points on the “arms” and in the middle there were black straps that could only be seen as restraints.
The dozen silent people in the chairs—I assumed them all to be men—wore what looked like plastic Hall
