Platypus

Mr. Needles

Sam Belle was Gideon's real dad. When he divorced the boy's pill-popping mama, Gideon was a cute blonde-haired ten-year-old with gorgeous blue eyes that would light up a room. He possessed ambivalent feelings toward his mother, named Linda, also a blonde, age 34, because she often beat him. He adored his dad. Sam, who Gideon resembled as a 'spitting image,' was the boy's protector, and even after the divorce, he would take his beloved son out on weekends and pick him up to get an ice cream cup or cone or ride go-karts after school. After the delightful one-on-one time, he'd reluctantly go home to stay with his mom. She'd been granted custody because American jurisprudence tends to favor the mother, and the conversations between the woman and her son tended to be terse exchanges, usually angry ones.

Sometimes Sam Belle would drive Gideon to his Little League baseball games, his team was the Braves, and watch him play shortstop. The boy always kept his favorite bat; a kid's sized Louisville Slugger colored red, white, and blue, in a corner of his bedroom by a poster of Ken Griffey Jr., a major league superstar who still played on the Cincinnati Reds.

"How was your time with HIM?" Her tone was invariably surly.

"His name is Sam. He was your husband until recently. He's also still my dad."

"Don't you dare speak that way to your mother, Gideon Belle! You little shitass! (She backhands the boy across the lips.) You look just like him. It's like having him still living here, only a fucking junior version. I asked you a question. How was your time with HIM?"

"Fine," Gideon would invariably answer at first.

He'd bolt up to his bedroom at that point; they lived in a dingy duplex on the fringes of dreary Dorchester.

Before he'd turned eleven, Gideon's pill-popping mother started doing crack. The powder wasn't cheap, and she started whoring herself to get it. Soon thereafter she met Mike the Plumber. A plug-ugly angry thirty-year-old with a bulging gut and a gutter mouth and his own three hundred dollar a day coke habit, he sold the stuff for the big dealers haunting Southie's mean streets, especially Terrence Shinola, whom they called 'Mr. T' and the gangster Shadrock Shitley, who ran the rackets in Southie.

Mike's real name was D'Ambroglio, and he loathed little blond-haired Gideon, whom he often tried to 'teach a lesson' when he was high, cuffing the boy when he least expected it so he'd always remain wary of his mother's nasty boyfriend. Eleven-year-old Gideon, an exceedingly handsome boy in the image of his also blonde father, would strive mightily to stay out of D'Ambroglio's way, so as not to get smacked around. His smacks hurt worse than those given him by his mother because they were delivered with more force, usually to the back of his step-son's head although he kept threatening an old fashioned 'butt-licking,' in the bare ass style, like 'my dad used to give me when I needed it,' he was fond of saying in his low-level braggadocio. Gideon wouldn't watch the downstairs television, the only color one, when 'the Plumber' was in.

Mike the Plumber had a nickname for Gideon the boy despised. Mike took to calling him 'Pretty Boy,' and although the sixth grade girls were already phoning regularly and 'becoming a nuisance' according to Linda and her junkie 'man,' Gideon realized there was some truth to it. 'I am good-looking,' he mused, with a tiny streak of narcissism common to handsome boys with even a modicum of self-esteem.

What self-esteem Gideon possessed came from the time he still spent with his real dad, Sam Belle, who'd pick him up in his Chevy Impala. He'd honk loud enough to summon the neighbors while never failing to infuriate the 'adults' that Gideon was unfortunately fated to co-exist with in the same dwelling.

"It's your fuckin' fadda," Linda would always say in her vicious snarling way. Mike would chime in and grimace, muttering something ugly like, "You just wait 'till I'm your daddy," as he'd cast a parting glance in the fast-leaving boy's direction.

Gideon would involuntarily shudder as he'd bound out the front door to greet his beloved Dad. He knew that Mike was screwing his mother but hoped to God it wouldn't get legal. Mike was saying the words more often lately, which was scary.

"Dad, I'm so glad to see you," Gideon would say, always hugging his father tight, as if there'd be a time when he couldn't anymore.

"Gideon, I love you son," Sam always began, "What do you want to do today?"

When they were together, even the deciding was fun.

When Gideon's twelfth birthday had passed by three months, Mike and Linda tied the knot. It was a big raucous wedding, with hundreds of people, including a generous helping of who the blonde-haired sixth grader took to calling 'pond scum,' street denizens and criminal elements populating Greater Boston's metropolis, showing their faces at the newlywed's lavish reception. Gideon got to go too, eating his fill of gangster-catered delicacies and being introduced to some of Mike the Plumber's connections, including Terrence Shinola and the ganglord Shadrock Shitley, who was with two burly and tough-looking associates named Bruno and Keith.

Shitley took exceptional notice of 'Mike's kid' – looking over the 5'4" [1.62 m] handsome boy dressed in a white tuxedo with white dress shoes, looking spiffed for the wedding with his carefully coiffed dirty blonde hair combed neatly back – looking him up and down – down and up – in a disconcerting stare.

Mike was standing there too with a stupid grin on his face, next to Gideon.

"Is this your son?" asked Shitley. He moved forward to shake the twelve-year-old's hand.

Gideon reach his own out too, fingers extended, like a white lamb hesitant to touch a black wolf. The boy's grin was wary. He wanted to get away from this awful man whom he already knew by reputation. He cringed as Shitley shook his hand in a crude pumping motion.

Mike replied with a sardonic grin, loathe to claim the kid. "No, he's just my step-son."

It was almost a contract going down in that single instant, although nobody knew it yet. The contract would be entered into all in due time.

"That's good," Shitley said. Bruno and Keith nodded; Gideon also detected a knowing wink from Bruno. He could only guess what that might mean.

But for now, it was only a cumulus building, not yet a perfect storm. Gideon turned on his well-shod heels and spun in the direction of an age mate female he wanted to converse with.

The girl was pretty, he knew her from his sixth grade class, and she was already smiling when he approached her.

"Hi." She said.

"Hi."

She thought he had such a sexy voice for a boy.

As Linda and Mike consummated their married life, there was never a honeymoon for Gideon. Mike became increasingly possessive of the boy, as if his step-son was a pet or a piece of property, and any actions he deemed unfavorable were dealt with more harshly than before. Linda was also able to get Sam Belle's visitation reduced, due to her 'newfound stability' in the home, as it appeared to the juvenile court judge; Sam could see his son only once a month when all the court papers were said and done, in unsupervised visits. He also technically got an additional one-hour 'supervised' visit every two weeks, but these led to contrived staring contests between the adults at best, and violent arguments, shouting matches, and nearly a fistfight between Mike and Sam with Linda raking her ex-husband's back with her sharp fingernails like a she-cat, at worst. Sam voluntarily just used the single unsupervised visit once a month, after that fiasco. After a few months, even these rare visits ceased, when Linda and Mike made excuses and prevented Gideon's real dad from seeing him even then. Gideon became a desolate boy, increasingly isolated in the sanctuary of his upstairs bedroom, unless his mother and step-father had other ideas.

When the boy's sixth grade year was almost over, at age twelve years six months, his grades were plummeting, and Mike felt, as his 'Dad,' that it was his 'job' to 'lay the law down,' as he put it. One night, a few days after bringing home a 'bad report card,' Gideon listened to the couple discussing how to punish him. He overheard their loud voices down in the kitchen, and finally, when both of them were high enough on whatever substances they'd been abusing, they decided to come upstairs and 'teach the kid a lesson,' as Mike the Plumber phrased it. He'd dozed off to sleep, it was about one in the morning, when the bedroom light came on, and the voices were there, in Gideon's bedroom with him.

"Wake up! Wake up you little shit!" his mother said.

"I'm going to enjoy this!" Mike screamed, as he pulled the covers off his startled and suddenly awakened step-son.

The boy was terrified, as well he might be. The adults were about to 'have their fun' at his expense.

"Get up! Out of bed! Now!" Mike the Plumber raged. He was practically foaming at the mouth and staring at the boy, who had no choice but to obey that first time. "Strip! Take off those pajama bottoms!"

Gideon reluctantly obeyed, ashamed, pleading with his mother who just stood there with a look of hatred shooting like a laser in the direction of her only child. "Please, don't make me!" Gideon pleaded.

"Lay down on your belly over your bed. I'm going to teach you a lesson boy!" Mike yelled, nearly hoarse, red eyes bulging.

He took off the leather strap, the belt tightening his filthy blue jeans, and swung it in the air twice, testing it. He used his other hand to lift the twelve-year-old's pajama top, so as to bare Gideon's lower back and everywhere below down to his heels, and present a clear target for the lash. Gideon was totally vulnerable, his backside naked from the waist down. "My God, pretty boy even has a pretty butt!" Mike exclaimed to the exhilarated Linda, smiling with glee to see the son that she loathed because he reminded her of Sam, her ex-husband, about to be punished. "I'll bet it's pretty fuckable!" he added.

Gideon lay there just awakened, getting used to the harsh light, and started sobbing. "I'll do better in school!" he yelled.

"It's too late for that!" Linda said.

Gideon sobbed louder, especially when he heard the strap descending, and when it made contact, creating a pinkish welt on the left cheek of his tender behind. The boy screamed. Mike decided he liked that sound.

Mike the Plumber developed a taste for punishing the boy after that; beatings on his bare ass and the backs of his legs occurred weekly as the summer continued, and one night when Linda was zonked out cold on the adult's bed downstairs, and couldn't have sexual relations with him, Mike decided for the first time to 'do the boy,' as he described it. After punishing Gideon with the strap, hitting him maybe a dozen times, he pulled down his own filthy blue jeans, and penetrated the boy's anus ungreased, raping the boy, and tearing him inside the sphincter, so that he bled, as Gideon screamed bloody murder from the assault and the excruciating pain. "There," he said afterwards, petting the back of the boy's head like a caress, "I'll bet you enjoyed that, didn't you pretty boy?" Gideon just buried his head in his hands and kept sobbing, as his step-father finally got up and left the room, politely switching off the bedroom's light. Gideon was sodomized by his step-dad three more times, before the boy's nightmare really began.

It was a misdirected shipment of crack and crystal meth that caused the shit to hit the fan. Trouble was it was Shitley's shit, and Mike the Plumber was in deep 3; He had delivered almost $400,000 in Shitley's drugs to one of Mr. T's underlings, a certain Mr. G. One night, a terrified Michael D'Ambroglio was summoned before Shitley's cartel; after Bruno uttered the now infamous line to the Plumber that all of Southie's streets were soon repeating like parrots, "Plumber, why is it that you don't know Shitley from Shinola?" Michael was taken in the gangster's limousine for what he assumed initially was his last ride anywhere. "I own you now Mike, by rights I should break your legs and then burn them off and leave you outside tonight in a Congress Street alley."

"Or you could just blow his brains out," chimed in Bruno, Shadrock's #1.

"But he has collateral," Keith said, Shadrock's #2.

"What collateral?" wondered Mike with a hopeful I'll do anything look of bewilderment.

"The boy," Keith replied. "I'm talking about his stepson."

"What's the boy's name again?" Shadrock asked.

"Gideon," said Mike, almost jubilantly.

"We'll call it even if we can utilize the kid for the contests over the next few months."

"What are the contests?" Mike asked. Suddenly he was about as intrigued as a scumbag can get.

Gideon had just started 7th grade. He was a resilient boy, even if he had been fucked a few times by his step-dad. His anus had healed since the last time, it'd been more than three weeks, and though his spirit was broken and he terribly missed Sam Belle, his real Dad, he'd apply himself to his schoolwork and also decided to go out for 7th grade cross-country. He was a powerful little runner, developing strong legs and feet; if not a racer straight out of the box, Gideon had stamina and pluck; he was starting to dream he could be a long-distance runner. He was already running on Dorchester's gritty streets, ducking the traffic like a lithe young panther. He had friends time him with a stopwatch. It felt good, the pounding of his sneakered soles in a rhythmic motion; he liked the synchronicity of his near-pubertal body, arms pumping, chest heaving. Mostly Gideon liked the way his feet felt free and easy, as if he could get extra lift from his toes acting as pistons. Tomorrow he would ask the coach, the cross-country coach, if he could try out.

When he got home from school that day, Mike the Plumber was waiting. He had some news that Gideon wasn't going to like.

"Hi Gideon," Mike greeted him. The Plumber had a wicked grin that meant he was up to no good, but he wasn't high at that moment.

"Hi," Gideon replied, his eyes downcast, feeling his face flush florid and a little of the shame flooding back. He felt rage too, at this man, but Mike was an adult, and physically much stronger.

"You have to do something for me kid," he said. Those words first spoken and later realized in their enormity would come to haunt Gideon. They would always be the beginning of the ordeals to come, inseparable in the boy's mind from the ensuing ordeals themselves.

"What?" Gideon was puzzled. He sure wasn't psyched for getting pronged up the butt. Is that what Mike wanted? Sex?

Gideon looked embarrassed and immediately defensive. The boy visibly tensed.

"Relax," Mike told him, "It's not about me doing you again."

"What IS it about?" Gideon was wary as a boy can be, but it wasn't enough.

"I'm loaning you out to the guys from Southie."

"Who do you mean?"

"Shadrock Shitley and his associates want you to come by the projects on Friday."

"What for?"

"They didn't tell me," he lied. "I'm going to drop you off. It'll just be for the weekend, maybe Monday too."

"It'll just be this weekend?"

"This one and five more; one weekend a month for six months total. Just like National Guard duty."

"Do I have to?"

"For mine and your mother's sake, yes. I made an agreement that you'll cooperate fully."

Gideon was starting to get angry and sullen. He still possessed some gumption. Nobody had asked him if he wanted to do this. This could interfere with everything. God, he was just about to go out for cross-country! It wasn't fair. He didn't want to obey. This asshole wasn't his real dad. He was just the drug dealing scumbag who'd married his monstrous mother. "No!" Gideon yelled. "I won't do it! I'm going out for cross country you asshole!"

Rage entered Mike the Plumber's coarse features in that instant. He drew back his hand, and smashed his open-palm into the twelve-year-old's face with considerable force, leaving a red mark. "Yes! Be ready to go on Friday! You're living under my roof you little bastard!"

On Friday afternoon after school, he said goodbye to his mother who hardly noticed her own son as was typical, and Mike drove them both to Shitrock's lair in the projects. Gideon hardly said a word in the twenty minutes it took to get there.

Gideon never forgot what the building looked like. Made of red brick, one story, away from the hundreds of other units, off by itself, it was a standalone. Although he wasn't excited by his present companion, his stepfather was preferable to whatever and whoever awaited the boy inside those doors.

"Let's go in. They're expecting you, pretty boy."

"Are you going to stay?" Gideon asked plaintively. He was a monster, true, but he was 'family,' at least technically.

"No. they told me just to drop you off. Bring your bag in. You're staying at least for the weekend. I'll pick you up when they tell me too, not a second sooner."

"What is this all about? They must have told you."

"Nope, they didn't. Anyway, you'll know soon enough. I'm sure somebody will explain it to you."

"Who?"

"I don't know. Maybe Shitley. Hurry up. Get your bag."

Gideon reached into the back seat and fished out his gray canvas travel bag. He'd packed it like a mopey little dick, with an overwhelming heaviness enveloping his entire body like he was swimming in maple syrup. It contained his toothbrush, floss, a dental pick with a rubber tip, Crest toothpaste as he needed white teeth to impress the girls, his hairbrush, a change of pants, a change of shirt, and two spare pairs of briefs and socks. He was wearing a white and green decaled cotton T-shirt that said Boston Celtics on it that his real father had bought him almost a year ago, a pair of freshly washed blue jeans, white cotton athletic socks, and a pair of battered Nikes with the beginning of a hole worn through the right large toe.

He opened the car door, and looked plaintively at Mike the Plumber to somehow save him from this latest outrage at the last second, like a reprieve from the gallows. It wasn't to be since that flint-hearted bastard was good for only one thing in Gideon's 12-year-old imagination: Screwing people. "Bye," the boy said tersely. Slowly he walked to the fateful door which served as the headquarters for Shadrock's criminal organization. Almost instantly, like a scared rabbit, Mike D'Ambroglio drove off. It was about nine of the clock on a Friday evening, the first of what would be six such Friday evenings for poor Gideon. Showing more courage than his stepfather ever would've in a similar circumstance, the boy knocked. They were expecting him, and Keith answered the door.

"The kid's here," Keith announced to the others inside.

'Here' looked like a big condo. There were about fifteen men inside the five room suite, milling and talking. Some had drinks in their hands, beers or harder drinks like the brownish whisky that Gideon had heard so much about. These were drug runners and bookies and pimps and hit men, a criminal potpourri. Most were dressed in sports shirts and nice slacks, looking quite presentable the boy thought. Mr. 'T' was there, and also Mr. 'G,' not to mention Bruno, Keith, and Shadrock Shitley himself, gliding through the rooms like a tuna among fishes. It was some kind of a meeting, the eve of some sort of weekend seminar, a word that Gideon already knew because one of the kids at school, the kid's dad gave them, but to salespeople, not to gangsters. "Maybe nothing bad will happen tonight," Gideon mused.

The men noticed him immediately, and obviously knew his purpose for being there. "The kid's here, Shad," Bruno said in a louder than normal voice. He's a bruiser that one, as Gideon's mother used to say when describing such men to the boy when they'd passed them on the streets. The tag still stuck with the boy as a way to describe such men. These guys were burly types, weighing over 200 pounds [90 kg] and heavily muscled. Other than that, their physical descriptions ran the gamut of Caucasian humanity, as there were no black men or Asians or Arabs in this crowd. His dad was big and well-muscled, as he hoped to grow up into, but not what one would call 'burly.' One of the men offered Gideon a ginger ale, and showed him where an early tech big screen television was in a back bedroom. Gideon drank the ginger ale; half-suspecting that someone might have spiked it with alcohol. Amid all the noisy grown-up conversations, the boy grew drowsy, and eventually fell asleep in his clothes on the made-up bed, a twin-sized, that was in the room where the television glowed after someone switched off the light, perhaps out of consideration. Someone might have murmured, "He'll need his shut-eye tonight," but it also might have been the boy remembering those halcyon days when adults he loved had tucked him in.

The next morning it began. It was ordeal #1, the training ordeal for the competition ordeal, which was ordeal #2. These ordeals, #1 and #2 in some form, would continue for Gideon over this weekend and subsequently one weekend a month over the next five months, alternating successively.

For now, the 'pretty blonde boy,' aged 12 years and 8 months, would begin what would in effect be initiations for him, and lessons in human cruelty for the enforcers in Shadrock Shitley's organization. On this Saturday morning, Gideon Belle was asked to prepare himself hygienically with his morning ablutions, and then he had 'free time' spent watching television in the bedroom while fully dressed, and with everyone out waiting for him in the suite's 'medical observation' room, all men and all gangsters prepared to dispassionately learn from the 7th grader's experience, about 20 criminal figures in all, the boy was ordered by Bruno to 'lose the shirt,' and so Gideon pulled off his white-and-green Boston Celtics logoed shirt, and allowed his left wrist to be extended and handcuffed to a convenient post, exposing his left underarm and armpit freshly deodorized as part of his morning ablutions with a nice, twenty-minute-warm shower bath along with a freshly washed expanse of tender boy-skin above the waist; the boy's bare back and chest and sensitive belly were all exposed for what was to occur as he lay on his backside with his left arm tethered and extended, situated on a wide physician's examination table with white paper atop it that crinkled under the boy's sturdy 95-pound [43 kg] frame.

First, Bruno and Keith inspected Gideon's skin to see if it had been cleansed properly; when Shadrock Shitley entered the 'medical observation' room, Shitley murmured a request, motioning with his right hand, and Gideon was repositioned to lie on his stomach with his left wrist re-cuffed.

"I guess we'll begin on the kid's back," the gang leader said. This ordeal was to be conducted entirely with needles, and Mr. Shitley was handed a tray full of assorted sharp-pointed needles to begin his slow, tortuous work. All the needles possessed wooden handles at the non-pointed end for ease of use and maximum efficiency. Bruno dabbed a bit of prepping alcohol or witch-hazel as a disinfectant prior to all insertions.

Seconds after Gideon felt the splash of cooling liquid on the back of his left shoulder, he felt the first sharp pain, a jab with the needle, a larger one, beginning to penetrate the tender flesh of that shoulder, into the edges of the firm and developing muscle below the boy's skin. "As you will notice, all of the needle work has to be worked horizontally below the surface of his skin, never stabbed vertically downwards into these particular areas of the kid's body." Gideon was whimpering now, and sobbing softly, as there was already considerable pain involved.

"Quiet boy, this entire ordeal today is being done as much for your benefit as for our edification, to prepare you for the much greater pain expected with the #2 ordeal, which will begin on schedule next month at this time. You should be thanking me, kid."

Gideon merely grunted in increased pain, as more needles were being inserted and yanked out, in new areas of his bare back, horizontally, entering his skin and tissue on a slant, perhaps at a 50 degree-angle; this torture continued with needles 'sticking' the twelve-year-old in the middle of his back, his lower back, along the fleshy skin near his rib cage; always painful, Gideon never grew accustomed to the needle insertions and withdrawals; sometimes these withdrawals hurt more because the needle itself was irregular, or even flanged, with projections that when removed proceeded against the grain of Gideon's sensitized and tender skin, tearing more skin as it was slowly pulled out by Shadrock Shitley, a person whom the boy already had given a nickname to in his juvenile mind, 'Mr. Needles,' an acronym which was to become indelibly 'stuck' in the boy's memory.

Sunday was the next phase of Ordeal #1. This morning, Gideon could watch everything that was happening to him. He gazed at the faces of the men watching him suffer, and witnessed no pity in those faces. The 12-year-old was cuffed with his left underarm and armpit exposed, lying on the medical table's crinkly white paper on his back, which was still sore from the previous day.

"Hello Gideon. We're back to have some more fun!" The voice of Mr. Needles penetrated the 7th grader's consciousness as he'd been daring to try a nap. "Today we'll be tormenting your chest and tummy – and also more thoroughly along your sides and ribs – wherever it hurts the most!"

Shitley used a variety of needles to pierce the boy's naked skin in a host of locations during the next several hours. Again, the instructor in torture made his instructions correspond perfectly with the exact procedure that was in progress as Gideon wailed and sobbed. "I'm using a sharp wide flange needle to penetrate his left pectoral muscle now, there's a little bit of blood, and a lot of pain 3;" Mr. Needles was able to elicit a few genuine screams from the boy, especially as tissue was torn when the sharp flanged large-bore needle was slowly extracted. Gideon's chest resembled a bloodied hamburger maybe a dozen needle punctures later, but the next ordeal segment was coming.

"We'll do his belly and around his navel now," Mr. Needles said, and the instruments pierced and were extracted, gradually and slowly, until sometime during the evening when Gideon was growing hoarse from repeatedly being jabbed, poked, pierced, and having an assortment of sixteen needles pulled out of his mauled skin. Every needle was sterilized, and the surrounding skin disinfected, but this did nothing to reassure the sobbing and nearly hysterical 12-year-old.

Finally, it was over at about 9 p.m. on Sunday evening when Mike the Plumber came to pick the boy up and to take him back home, his oft-punctured back and chest wrapped in a thin covering of bandage & gauze under the Boston Celtics green and white shirt. "Did you have fun?" his stepfather asked sweetly. Gideon glared at this usurper of his real father. As for the question, it didn't merit a response.

Gideon made the best out of the rest of September. His cuts from the needles in ordeal #1 had been painful while they were occurring, but youth is resilient. He was also determined to make the 7th grade cross-country team, where his fleet and sturdy feet would serve him well over the 2.5 mile [4 km] outdoor course. He ran, and he ran, trying to dispel memories of emotional and physical pain. The hilly course near his junior high school became like a second home, and eventually his timed intervals on the course attracted the attention of the track team's coach. Mr. Lawrence, an amiable 35-year-old with a moustache who knew little of Gideon's recent travails, finally permitted him to run with the rest of the junior high school team during the last track meet of that September. He finished a very respectable third of eight junior high runners, and when Mr. Lawrence singled him out for praise, the boy was elated.

"Gideon. Gideon Belle. Come on over here boy!"

Gideon walked over to the coach, striding confidently and easily.

"You have the makings of a great competitor, young man. Excellent race! Can you be ready for next week's meet? I'd like to see you competing with us for the rest of the season. Can you make the commitment?"

"Yes sir!" Gideon said. When he left the track course that day, the boy was happier than he'd been in a long time.

But all too quickly, the fateful weekend arrived, Gideon attempted to hide. He ran away after school heading into the Back Bay section of Boston, hoping to not be found until at least Monday when it'd be too late for Mr. Needles and the boy's promised ordeal #2. But Mike the Plumber had anticipated such a reaction and had paid several neighborhood 8th graders to shadow the fleeing 7th grader – whom they promptly spotted in the subway station. True to their code as young human hyenas, three of the tougher, slightly older boys cornered Gideon and brought him back to the Hell that was his 'home.' Gideon begged. "Please Mike! They're going to kill me! Don't take me to Mr. Needles! Please! I'll do anything. I'll let you fuck me as much as you want! Please! You can't take me back to those monsters!" Mike D'Ambroglio found the boy's entreaties amusing and rather pitiful, but knew what he had to do. "I'll do you anyway if I want to have your cute little butt as a change of pace from your mom. But now, you're coming with me!" he barked.

Again, the boy was dropped off at the gang's headquarters, marched right up to the door so that he couldn't escape. He'd dried his tears for the time being. Bruno opened the door. It was Friday evening of the second month. Mike gave the reluctant boy a little shove and he was safely grabbed by Keith and Bruno, two burly men, and was inside. Gideon immediately attracted attention of all the men, this time a larger crowd of about fifty unsavory types, and after a few minutes, a guy with red hair handed the 7th grader a coke and a couple of sugar donuts. He was allowed to watch TV undisturbed and felt miserable and anxious about the morning to come and his ordeal #2, the first of three competitions, and whatever that might entail. After barely fifteen minutes of a sitcom called 'Two and a Half Men,' he fell asleep without taking more than two sips of the soda.

The second Saturday morning began much like the first. Gideon had a slice of toast and a glass of orange juice for breakfast after showering and completing his other morning ablutions; a change to the script was the shirt. Instead of the Boston Celtics shirt with the familiar logo, the 7th grader, now aged 12 years & 9 months, had been given a new shirt, also freshly laundered, but on it were emblazoned the words Please hurt me. Make me suffer! He hadn't noticed what was written on the shirt front when he'd quickly complied to put it on. When Gideon was led back over to the 'medical observation' room and told to lie back on the crinkly paper covered medical exam table like the previous month, and once again had his left wrist cuffed and secured, he wasn't asked to remove the new shirt he'd been given. In fact, for a few moments while the small crowd of fifty men who were denizens of the South Boston underworld gathered around him, he was allowed to remain fully dressed. But Bruno and Keith were ready and willing to do the bidding of Shadrock Shitley, who showed up momentarily. They were all waiting for this week's competitors, a two-man team referred to as 'dentists,' only Gideon would discover that these sadistic men weren't like any dentists he'd ever known. "The dentists are on their way." Keith told Mr. Needles.

"Okay, get those shoes and socks off the kid, and also his jeans and briefs," Mr. Needles ordered. "He has to be nude from the waist down for ordeal #2," Shadrock Shitley added like an afterthought, as if it hardly mattered.

But it did matter to Gideon. "No! You can't!" the boy screamed, louder than at any time during his first experience of 'practice' ordeal #1 a full month before.

Bruno efficiently stripped the kid. First, he untied the laces on his left Nike, a battered sneaker, and slipped off the footwear. Next he pulled off the white cotton sock to bare the boy's left foot. The big man dutifully proceeded to the 7th grader's right Nike, equally battered and scuffed with wear marks, undid the laces on that one, and slipped it off, followed by the right foot's sock. Gideon was sobbing because his treasured feet were now exposed. "Didn't my step-dad tell you I run track for my school?" the boy wailed.

"Actually, he mentioned something about that," replied the mobster boss, Shitley. "That very fact should add to our fun this weekend. Your cute little feet will receive a lot of attention this weekend." There were many knowing nods and winks, as this competitive ordeal's details were well known to everybody in attendance, except for Gideon, of course.

Meanwhile, the boy's stripping was continuing. Bruno first undid the belt clasp on Gideon's jeans, undid his zipper, and began slipping the twelve-year-old's pants off his legs. When that was accomplished, he slid his thick strong fingers under the elastic waistband of the boy's clean pair of white Hane's briefs, and began pulling these too down the boy's legs, past his ankles and off his bare feet.

Attempting to preserve a shred of modesty, the boy desperately covered his 'privates' with the shirt, his only apparel left, the words Please hurt me. Make me suffer! suddenly more visible than ever.

The competitors, the first team of fake 'dentists' of three that would eventually be competing in the infamous #2 ordeals, arrived a moment or two later, when Gideon heard the door to the building open and somebody let them in. Seconds later, the men who would be his first major tormentors were close up for the first time. He'd get to know them very well that weekend.

"Meet Jeffers and Paulie," Shadrock Shitley said to Gideon as the boy's first experience with ordeal #2 was set to commence. "They'll be competing with two other teams of guys we're calling 'dentists' to see how much pain they can cause you this weekend. Are you ready for them to begin their procedures?"

"No, please, don't do this!" Gideon pleaded.

Jeffers was a guy with a shaved head, maybe in his early forties. He smiled a lot and had two front teeth missing. Heavyset, he had strong forearms, but not much body fat.

Paulie was younger, maybe thirty, with brown hair and bushy brown eyebrows that looked to be dyed the same color as his head hair. He was thin, but taller than his partner. His teeth were a little decayed, and his breath stank as Gideon soon discovered, but he wasn't missing any teeth.

Jeffers wanted to get going immediately, partially to show how cruel he could be. "Let's get a better look at this boy," he said.

"He's all set for you guys," Bruno said, "Even wearing our festive shirt."

That's all Gideon was wearing.

Jeffers gleefully read the words printed on the shirt, as he spread it out so it could be read. Please hurt me. Make me suffer! he repeated.

Gideon learned at that moment what he'd been wearing. "No! Please!" the 12-year-old cried.

"As for where on his body this ordeal #2 is to take place, you can target his feet and his cock and balls, nowhere else!"

"No!" Gideon wailed softly. "Not my feet! I run track for my school's cross-country team!"

Several laughs of pure sadistic enjoyment were heard from those men gathered at the boy's mild outburst. The fact the boy cared about the condition of his feet and was worried about them for a reason other than pure dread of pain made the sport everyone was anticipating especially delicious.

"I see," Jeffers said. He inspected Gideon's left foot more closely. "You're hoping we won't hurt your feet too badly?"

"I'm hoping you won't hurt them at all!" Gideon exclaimed in fearful naiveté.

"He seems to have lots of tender, fleshy areas on this foot; it's sturdy, well-muscled for a boy of his age," Jeffers began. He palpated Gideon's foot, almost tickling simultaneously, "lots of adipose tissue, nice-looking, clean, ridges of sensitive skin on the underside and between each toe, the ball of this boy's foot is very meaty. I like the shape and texture, his instep and arch, and his heel look to have excellent tone; his soles must have an abundance of sensitive nerve endings."

"I'm sure they do," agreed Shitley for the audience's benefit, "He's one of the best-looking boy candidates we've had in the six years we've been holding our contests."

Gideon was red-eyed and tearful dreading what was to come.

"Let's have a look at his right one, shall we?" Jeffers dropped Gideon's bare left foot, depositing it gently on the examination table's white crinkly paper. He picked up and lifted the 7th grader's bare right foot. A second inspection similar to the first commenced. "This one is just as soft, and has the same marvelous texture," Jeffers said, "again, lots of adipose tissue on the ball, his insteps are delicate too, the same beautiful ridges on the underside and between his toes, his toes are very even; we should test the sensitivity under his toenails on this foot and on his left; make him really scream as Paulie and I scratch and dig under these nails."

"That is certainly allowed, even encouraged," Bruno stated matter-of-factly.

"No please, don't do that!" Gideon sobbed.

"Again, his soles must have an abundance of sensitive nerve endings," Jeffers remarked. He absentmindedly tickled Gideon's right sole with three fingers of one hand while firmly grasping the boy's toes with the other. "We won't exclude either foot from what we do to its counterpart."

Paulie lifted the message shirt slightly to expose the second targeted area. The younger man began deliberately fondling Gideon's penis. Despite his best efforts to stop his own organ from erecting, the attention began causing a bit of lengthening, and hardening, a state of semi-tumescence. The boy felt ashamed. "How old is this boy?"

"Twelve years and nine months, very close to beginning puberty," Bruno said matter-of-factly.

Jeffers joined in the lewd examination of the kid's genitals. "He's nicely circumcised, and the head is almost bulbous, a perfect mushroom."

"I like the color and texture as well; and his balls are nearly symmetrical. I wonder how he'll like needles and the pain we cause him with our other instruments – the ones that you allow." The question wasn't really a question but it elicited a kind of strangled sob from Gideon until Paulie squeezed his left testicle in a pinching motion, using his thumb and index finger. "It's not time for you to scream yet boy. We'll make you scream. Keep quiet in the meantime."

"Again, lots of sensitive nerve endings to test his reactions with," Jeffers said.

Gideon whimpered softly. He couldn't help it. He was terrified about what these men would do to him. The rapes by his stepfather were bad enough, but what would occur in ordeal #2, these tortures would be horrific.

"He will be dabbed with alcohol before every procedure, and disinfectant as needed, but he is to receive nothing to alleviate pain," Mr. Needles pronounced. He might as well have added, let the competition begin.

It began about twenty minutes later with the agony of the feet. After the needle was soaked in an astringent for disinfectant purposes and also to make it sting more, as Gideon squealed and squirmed, although his leg each time was held down by burly arms so that he wouldn't thrash unnecessarily, Jeffers began to methodically 'clean' under the 12-year-old's toenails with a sharp serrated needle, made more for cruelly gouging than for gingerly scratching. The shaved-headed man started with the 7th grader's big toe on his left foot. Using the barbaric instrument, he pushed its jagged tip under the nail and deep down onto the unprotected nail bed; when that toe was bleeding and raw, he went on to the next, and methodically and slowly followed the identical procedure as Gideon screamed a white-hot cry, tears pouring from his eyes as the excruciating pain was perceived unceasingly by the boy's brain. Jeffers 'did' each toe in turn, then when all five were bleeding and raw, he started over, 'doing' the already scored nail beds at least five more times. Gideon screamed and bawled the entire time.

"Let me do his right foot," Paulie asked, and such civility among torturers seemed only fair. Jeffers handed the serrated needle to his partner, to the other 'dentist,' and he began differently, 'doing' the small toe first, and then graduated to the other toes until he reached Gideon's right big toe, but if anything, Paulie was yet more vicious, using more pressure to gouge with the needle more thoroughly, not missing a spot, and also engaging in several 'do-overs' on each of the boy's toes. All Gideon could do was scream and sob.

Gideon was still sobbing when Jeffers began with a long curved flanged needle to score along the 12-year-old's right sole, deeply lacerating the skin from the boy's heel to the underside of his sensitive toes, and between each one. Paulie provided identical ministrations to Gideon's left foot, holding his toes while 'working' the tender sole. The boy's screams and cries, while frightful, were also entertaining.

During the rest of that day and into the evening, ordeal #2 barely missed a beat except for brief intermissions and 'coffee breaks' for the adults attending the gangster's seminar. Gideon's feet were subjected to a potpourri of excruciating torments involving needles. Highlights were probably the large-bore needles, the ones with the sharpest points, driven like slivers through the 7th grader's entire foot puncturing through the sole and working deeper into the boy's flesh, until the instrument emerged out the other side – on the top portions of his bare feet. Forty to forty-five puncturing procedures followed in leisurely succession, causing the boy to wail and writhe as one serrated and extremely sharp hook-like instrument after another was allowed to pierce the adipose tissue of the balls, insteps, and heels of Gideon's precious feet. Every serrated hook-like needle was sadistically forced through the resisting flesh excruciatingly slowly and painfully until it protruded out the other side. A favorite target through the ball of Gideon's left and later his right foot ended up just below the joint of the boy's large toe on top of his foot. That procedure and several akin to it were performed on each of the young runner's feet, as his screams turned into a virtually constant agonized wail, and what was worse occurred as these needles were perhaps more slowly and painfully extracted, and by the end of the evening, Gideon's feet were still too sore for him to walk, even after being soaked in a brine and vinegar solution prior to the 7th grader's bedtime.

Sunday morning was the greatly anticipated time for Jeffers and Paulie to attack the near-pubertal boy's cock and balls.

Once re-tethered lying on his back, Gideon was still wearing that awful shirt, which said Please hurt me. Make me suffer! and naked from the waist down. He had to be helped to the table, as his feet were still very sore, but he was able to walk, if gingerly. It seemed surreal somehow, as in the beginning of the Sunday round of tortures; Gideon was trying to remain stoic, in hopes of making it 'less fun' to torture him. This strategy was admirable, and showed the boy's tremendous resilience and courageous spirit; although it was doomed to failure, as the boy's screams and assorted cries of distress were a large part of the grisly competition's allure.

This phase of his first ordeal #2, an experience that Gideon had never even dreamed about in his worst nightmares as a younger child, began a bit less painfully, but nevertheless diabolically. Jeffers held up the 12-year-old's penis and palpated the organ, making it somewhat erect so that it was starting to feel good while being stroked, as Paulie lifted the cursed shirt and lightly tickled the 7th grader's bare belly as an appetizer. "Okay, watch everybody, watch what I'm doing. I'm using the nail of my right index finger to stimulate the head of his cock near the piss-slit. Now with my left hand, I'm holding this Q-tip, and I'm guiding it nearer to his piss-slit. Okay, the right hand again, I'm opening the piss-slit after getting him to relax a little, and I'm going to start fucking his piss-slit with – the Q-tip."

"No, please don't," Gideon moaned, still attempting to remain stoic.

"The Q-tip isn't your average Q-tip. This one, and about twenty Q-tips to follow, Paulie has treated for our boy here; it's coated with an abrasive called Bylaxoil. Each of these specially prepared cotton tips, just for Gideon, is coated with gobs of the awful stuff. I say awful because as you're about to see why when I insert these into his cute little piss-slit.

Gideon was squirming, beginning to grow desperate. He didn't yet know why. The so-called 'dentist' was still holding his cock, and Bruno was restraining the boy's right hand and arm, so that he couldn't protect himself from what was about to happen. Suddenly, the first Q-tip plunged, not far, maybe a quarter-inch [5 mm] into the boy's exposed urethra, and Gideon began wailing, crying out not from pain, but nevertheless reacting to the unpleasant sensation that had now gone inside his cock! Although a potent antiseptic and somewhat acidic, it felt like cotton and sandpaper together, and as Jeffers twirled the Q-tip and plunged it deeper, the resultant sensation became immediately unbearable, as Jeffers and Paulie each failed to suppress a cruel laugh. Gideon felt like he would lose his mind. He tried to bolt and squirmed mightily on the examination table's crinkly paper. The sensation was like when tickling on your feet turns bad enough to become pain, only a thousand times worse, a burning, itching, and scraping sensation. When the first Q-tip was shoved by Jeffers almost the full four inches [10 cm] inside the boy's boner, the boy became nearly delirious with fright and discomfort from the unpleasant sensation. "The whole inside of his dick is getting nice and sensitized with this stuff," Jeffers bragged, and he pulled the first Q-tip out of Gideon's urethra only to insert another, loaded with generous dollops of fresh Bylaxoil. While this torture was going on, for nearly an hour, a continual parade of abrasive-coated Q-tips kept invading the 7th grader's piss-lips. The entire time Gideon felt like he wanted to scratch the inside of his dick raw with his own fingernails, the itching was so bad, only such imagined relief was of course impossible.

"Get that shit out of my dick, please," the boy kept begging, but he was laughed at and ignored. Tears were running down the boy's cheeks. It ended up like bugs crawling around inside his dick, endlessly, up and down, down and up, a crawling sensation that wouldn't quit. Even after the Q-tips were finally removed, after an hour of the hideous torment, the miserable effect of the Bylaxoil failed to lessen in the slightest, acting as an irritant just like it was intended to.

"Does your dick still feel itchy inside?" Paulie asked sweetly, stroking Gideon's bare tummy with his nasty shirt slightly raised.

"No!" the 12-year-old lied.

It was Jeffers who thought of Gideon's next torment. "While I work on his cute little dickhead with a nice and sharp scratching needle, Paulie is going to re-open yesterday's wounds on the soles of his feet with a similar instrument. We call this little game, 'Battle of the pains.' It won't be very much fun for the boy."

"No! You can't!" Gideon yelled in pure fear.

"Oh yes we can," Jeffers countered. "It's always fun to see how a boy reacts. Which nerve endings will win out? Which is more sensitive – the pink and tender tip of this 7th grade boy's cock, or the soles of his feet which are already lacerated and quite sore from yesterday's fun. It should be fascinating to see where most of the highest pitch screams will come from – cockhead or soles of his feet."

"But you have to do it simultaneously?" Shadrock Shitley asked.

"Yes, at the same time," Paulie reiterated for those vocabulary-challenged among the gangland figures.

Jeffers brought his sharp and vicious needle out and touched it to the sensitive glans of Gideon's four-inch [10 cm] penis. Paulie picked up Gideon's right foot, holding it firmly, pressing down with his thumb and index finger just below the boy's previously sensitized instep. He'd begin working the needle and regouging the boy's flesh on the underside of each of Gideon's toes, and between each toe, and progressing down the kid's sole to the heel.

"We'll begin in ten seconds," Jeffers said.

"No please," Gideon begged. "Don't hurt me again!"

A countdown commenced in the spirit of criminal camaraderie. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one 3;" The men's voices, most of them baritone or bass, sounded like an evil chorus.

The needles angrily descended on the boy's sensitive glans on his penis and on the soles of his right foot on the underside of his toes, big toe first. Jeffers carved out tiny circles with the needle's sharp point, concentrating like an artist or craftsman instead of the sham 'dentist' he was impersonating. Within seconds, he'd cut the boy's 'dickhead raw' as he phrased it, as lines of blood were not so gently scratched into Gideon's most sensitive penile tissue. Gideon screamed at this, but incredibly what Paulie was doing to his feet hurt worse; here the needle gouged flesh that had been damaged just the day before, was sadistically re-opened; every inch of scored 'meat' on the underside of his large toe on that foot, and between the first and second toes 3; It took Paulie close to ten minutes to torture just this miniscule area of Gideon's foot. He too was concentrating like an artist, producing the most exquisite pain and drawing it out past the limits of the boy's endurance, being as thorough as possible, as the 12-year-old track runner sobbed and wailed.

As Paulie proceeded toe by toe, and in-between each succeeding toe space with the cruel needle, Jeffers just as calmly re-did the boy's 'dickhead' in harmony with his partners ministrations on Gideon's right foot, a procedure that proceeded slowly, ever so slowly, as the needle tracked to the underside of the third toe, between the third and fourth toe, the fourth toe, the space in-between the fourth and baby toe, and finally the baby toe. When Gideon's flesh on the underside of all his toes on his right foot was appropriately scored with the sharp needle and transformed into a bloody mess, producing a symphony of wails, screeches, shrieks, and moans in concert with the work being done on the head of the 7th grader's raw and bloody cock, only then did Paulie proceed onto the boy's sole; ball, instep, and eventually the heel, with blood, but not copious amounts, sprinkling onto the crinkly white paper.

The left foot's sole received the identical torment sadistically administered, as Paulie attempted to explain the method to his cruel madness over the boy's screams, now ferocious in their intensity, and simultaneously Jeffers kept on methodically digging into the bloody flesh of the boy's dickhead, as if to go even deeper with the needle.

Finally this particular 'battle of the pains' mercifully ended, after an hour and a half, and Gideon was rewarded with a ten-minute break and some water. His soles and penis tip were disinfected with a stinging mixture of astringents (hydrogen peroxide mixed with witch hazel), the application of which caused new cries of distress to burst anew from Gideon's lips.

Highlights during the remainder of Gideon's first experience of ordeal #2 included a diabolical urethral torment, as Shadrock Shitley, the event's host and gangland imprimatur, involved himself to insert the tiny ball-bearing deep into the recesses of the boy's cock down near its base. This simple procedure only took a few seconds and wasn't particularly painful (just itchy, reintroducing the unbearably unpleasant sensation) as Mr. Needles used a Bylaxoil-smeared Q-tip to place or 'hide' the tiny ball-bearing.

The painful part was the digging into the boy's tender urethral tissue to 'find' the 'buried treasure' as it was referred to by the criminals gathered for the instructive event. For this part of the festivities, the sharp-edged metal dental pick, typically used for scraping tartar off the enameled surfaces of teeth, was employed for the entertainment of all, except for the boy. As if they were looking for a pearl in an ocean, or a proverbial needle in a haystack, the sharp-edged dental pick invaded the boy's piss-slit, proceeding down the walls of Gideon's urethra which were stabbed and nicked countless times during the effective crescendo of his ordeal – a hideous 'game' lasting only twelve minutes shy of a full two hours. By the time it was over, Gideon had not only screamed himself hoarse, he had mercifully fainted. This climactic event would mark the end of each of Gideon's ordeal #2 experiences.

At the end of the ordeal, Jeffers and Paulie failed in their attempts to re-locate the miniscule ball-bearing. In so doing, they did not win the $80,000 bonus prize being offered by the South Boston mobster. "Too bad," and "You guys really gave it a good try" and other utterances of condolence ensued for the unsuccessful team; they did win the standard prize of $25,000 just for executing their detailed plan of pain on the tortured 12-year-old.

Mike the Plumber came to pick up the boy, still moaning with pain and barely able to walk, late that Sunday evening. After a few days out of school recovering at home with his mother and 'beloved' stepfather, he slowly and painfully trudged off to school. The track team was out for a few weeks, but amazingly, Gideon had not quite given up on that dream either; it survived just as the fading dream that his real dad Sam might return like a knight in armor to rescue his son from the so-called 'adults' in his life. But Sam knew none of the gory details of what his son was being forced to endure. His schoolwork was average during this time, and a few weeks later, on a Friday evening, Mike delivered the boy again, now aged 12 years and 10 months, to the criminal element and the not-so-kind ministrations of 'Mr. Needles' for his second of three experiences of the less excruciating but nevertheless arduous ordeal #1.

He'd fought Mike the Plumber every step of the way, but was already remarkably healed below the waist. The boy realized this first ordeal would at least spare those portions of his body until the following month. It was only intended 'for practice' to prepare him for the pain he'd surely experience anew a month hence. Although certainly painful and unpleasant, this ordeal was much more bearable. Gideon was almost anticipating it on the third Friday evening of six such evenings. Inside the condo-like gang lair in the projects, he drank his ginger ale and watched television, the set tuned to the track & field channel, and the boy nearing thirteen seemed almost relaxed, experiencing a weird kind of emotional detachment. Up until it was time to switch off the light and go to sleep, the 7th grader tried to prepare mentally and emotionally for the first ordeal, and its schedule of painful procedures designed for the boy's benefit in a primitive sort of way. The light went off. Gideon's sleep grew surprisingly restful as he slept undisturbed. It would be another Saturday morning soon enough.

After his morning ablutions, Gideon reported again to the dreaded room with the medical table. He hopped onto it, shirtless, but otherwise clothed. Bruno came in, to cuff the boy's left wrist to the post next to the medical table. Now his arm was tethered and extended. A few minutes later, the seats in the room were filled, as the second experience of Ordeal #1 was set to begin. Five minutes later, the tension kept mounting in the 7th grader's bared stomach. Shadrock Shitley hadn't yet shown his face.

He was beginning to hope that he'd made other plans, perhaps a Saturday morning gangster slaying, and was dozing off on the crinkly paper, when 'Mr. Needles' entered the room. "Shit" the boy mumbled a bit too loud.

"You meant to say my surname," Shitley said, "Yes. Here I am Gideon."

Gideon just lay there on his back, anything but eager to become a human pincushion again, which was putting it mildly, as some of the needles were a lot bigger than pins.

So the 'practice' ordeal began on the 12-year-old's neck, with the insertion of the first sterilized needle, a medium bore which was the diameter of a ballpoint pen. Prior to this initial onslaught of pain, Mr. Needles asked Gideon a question.

"How have you healed from last month?"

"Okay I guess." Physically he was walking and peeing again, the latter without blood during the past several days. He'd tried to rejoin the cross-country team, but no longer had the stamina or heart, especially considering that his feet would be targeted for two more ordeals of similar horrific nature, and the 12-year-old realized this terrible fact.

"Think of it this way. You still have a month to heal, before the next dentists get to do you," Mr. Needles said.

"Okay, I will begin with a needle through the boy's neck, just below his Adam's apple. Notice how this is done, painfully, but not as to impair his breathing in the slightest."

Gideon felt the jab of the needle, and then more pain as it penetrated the skin along the front of his neck. The insertion bled slightly. It hurt more than slightly, but he didn't cry out or scream.

Gideon didn't really scream until several large-bore needles were jabbed into his pectoral muscles; one sharp and serrated point was as big around as a lawn dart. More blood spurted from the boy's chest, and it hurt terribly as Shadrock was penetrating his sensitive muscle tissue. "This is a delicate bit of torture, but I enjoy it," the monstrous Mr. Needles said while grinning. Gideon was occasionally screaming when the needle pierced a real tender area, or when Shitley worked the jagged needle around in an excruciating semi-circle, like when he did it just below the boy's left nipple.

It was bad later that afternoon on Gideon's belly, like the one that actually pierced the boy's navel, and along his ribs, on the extremely sensitive sides of his torso, but the sessions for the front of his body mercifully ended that evening around nine of the clock.

Sunday was a continuation, except this time the boy was chained shirtless lying on the crinkly paper (now not entirely white, but spotted with the boy's bloody spatters) on his still sore chest and stomach, so that Mr. Needles could work on his back, neck to waist. About forty needles of various sizes pierced the boy during Sunday, just as on the previous day.

Gideon was given a twenty-minute rest along with a roast beef supper as a 'treat,' which he only picked at.

"What's the matter with your appetite?" Bruno teased.

Gideon hated the needles in his back. They scared him more because he didn't see them going in, and he couldn't tell what size bore they were, until they actually penetrated.

Then he knew.

He screamed about fifteen times during the second day, but not continuously. This ordeal made him sore, and he faced a prolonged healing period of seven to ten days, but he was becoming conditioned to some degree to Ordeal #1.

When Mike the Plumber, his detestable step-father, came to pick him up, and take him home, Gideon was bandaged and waiting.

"You ready?" the Plumber asked.

"Let's go." The boy said softly, as if resigned to that fate too.

Again, Gideon missed a week of school (five days), and was dutifully trying to catch up when he got back to his junior high. It was mostly math assignments that gave him trouble; the other students were into pre-algebra and he'd missed some crucial lessons. His teacher, Mrs. Gondraith, didn't believe his story about having caught bronchitis because he didn't have a vestigial cough. What was I supposed to tell her? Gideon mused. That I was recuperating again from being tortured by murderous gangsters? Mrs. Gondraith had her own problems. An alcoholic, she tried hiding that truth from both her students and the school administrators. Gideon had noticed the metal flask filled with an amber liquid, and he wasn't the only one.

Back at home, Mike the Plumber raped him one night when his mother was having her period. The 7th grader bled less this time, but felt humiliated because he'd ejaculated along with his attacker. Sleepy, he'd shuffled off to school with a slightly strained walk, keeping his legs a little further apart the entire day, hoping no one noticed. The tragic part is that no one did.

The two weeks back at school passed with no thought of rejoining the cross country team. "Coach was asking about you, Belle," one of his teammates said to him one day as he was getting a science book out of his locker. On the way home, the boy nearing 13 began to cry, and couldn't stop. It was a regular jag. Once he entered his front yard, however, it was over. He knew it wouldn't help to express any emotions to either his mother or step-father. They don't give a rat's ass about me. Gideon frequently expressed such thoughts within his mind's eye.

The final week before the second ordeal #2 seemed to move very quickly when he'd wanted it to drag forever. Before he knew it, Friday had arrived. Gideon thought about running away again, but reconsidered. He was actually in his room early that evening when Mike D'Ambroglio came to fetch him. "You have your appointment pretty boy," is the way he phrased it. Oh yes my appointment. Even his musings were becoming sarcastic.

Gideon was tethered to the post lying on his back on the medical table covered by the crinkly paper, cleaned up from his morning ablutions and wearing the Please hurt me. Make me suffer! shirt and nothing else. His feet were bare and for the moment, the shirt covered his cock and balls, although the 7th grader knew that this wouldn't be for long. Shadrock Shitley was in the observation room, as were Bruno and Keith, but the second team of 'dentists,' so-called because they'd be probing inside Gideon's penis with a sharp-edged, curved metal dental pick, had yet to arrive. The room was full, this Saturday drawing even a larger crowd because of the age of the younger dentist, a very masculine-looking 14-year-old named Sean. Sean was himself still experiencing puberty, but he already had shown himself to be mean and excessively cruel, perhaps in a precocious way. With wavy dark blonde hair, and craggy features, Sean was handsome in a rugged fashion, but didn't possess the delicate looks and blonde perfection of the younger Gideon, at 12 years and 11 months, about 15 months his junior. Sean and Gideon went to different public schools, and somehow they'd never met, partly because Sean rarely attended school, often working in Shadrock's organization as a 'runner' of illicit narcotics and other contraband and with a surprising amount of experience as a junior enforcer – with two maimings and a suspicious death to his credit. But could he prove his mettle as a torturer? That's what many of those gangsters gathered were curious to find out.

Sean's partner this weekend was Russ, a 48-year-old fading killer known for his cruelty in decades past, trying to re-earn some respect from his nefarious cronies. He hadn't killed anyone in six years, when Terrence Shinola, known as 'Mr. T.' as mentioned earlier in this story, had ordered a 'hit' on a Negro couple and their three young children, aged 10, 6, and 3. Russ had botched it, turning the 3-year-old into a lifelong paraplegic. He'd been shy since then and was looking to regain stature. They were an odd couple, but most in the crowd were rooting for each of them. The money was also a lure; twenty-five thousand for finishing their portion of the competition; potentially an extra eighty grand for the treasure hunt in Gideon's urethra when it came to that.

A moment later, Gideon heard excited voices, a door opening and closing, and realized his doom was at hand. "You guys are here!" "Great!" "This should be a real show!" were a few of the ominous expressions the nearly 13-year-old's acute hearing picked up.

They entered the room and Gideon, lying half-nude on his back, but still modestly covered, saw his new tormentors for the first time. His eyes fixed instantly on Sean, the rugged-looking teenager only slightly older. "He's just a kid like me!" Gideon exclaimed.

Sean walked over to his 'patient' as he would choose to call him during that truly horrendous weekend for Gideon, and said nonchalantly, "What do we have here?" That broke the ice, provoking guffaws of laughter.

Russ, a rather homely man who'd been a serial killer in his youth, during a more productive time, lifted the special shirt as Gideon wisely removed his hand, and allowed him access to his most intimate anatomy. "Is this one thirteen yet?" he asked, looking at Gideon's effective custodians, Mr. Needles and his burly assistants, Bruno and Keith.

"No, he's a month less," said Bruno, matter-of-factly.

Sean had moved over to his prey, to begin touching, examining his age-mate's circumcised cock more closely than Gideon would ever have wanted. "He's got a few little hairs," the Irish lad said.

"But only a few, and they're just starting," Russ remarked, joining in the fondling. Gideon felt shame, but did prefer this kind of touching to the impending waves of pain.

Sean tried being macho. "I'm ready to hurt this kid."

"Are you sure you can do everything to him you'll need to, no matter how much he cries and screams?" Shadrock Shitley wanted to know.

"Yes," the junior thug said, "I'll prove it to you guys. This little wimp is going to regret the day he was born."

"Not just his cock and balls, Sean. You'll have to mess up his feet too." Keith instructed.

"No," Gideon sobbed, "Not my feet, you have to go easy on my feet."

Sean reached out and grabbed the nearly 13-year-old's small toe on his right foot with his index finger and thumb, gripping the foot's pinky hard, and twisted.

"Yeowwh!" Gideon shrieked.

"That's just a taste of what I'm going to do to your feet kid. I'm going to make you suffer worse than you've ever suffered!" Sean bragged.

"You'll have to go a ways to make that happen. He's already been through a #2 ordeal." Bruno said.

"Not with me and Russ working on him he hasn't," Sean bragged some more.

Gideon looked at the slightly older boy with a form of hate in his beautiful blue eyes. If he had a gun in his hand right then, the still-twelve-old might have shot to kill.

Sean and Russ were both eyeing Gideon's nude form from the waist down, wondering for a moment where to begin. Wolves might have similar feelings of predatory lust.

Russ grabbed a medium bore needle, and with his other hand, positioned the boy victim's ballsack the way he wanted. Two seconds later, Gideon really screamed for the first time when the sharp-pointed needle descended and plunged, piercing the semi-nude's left ball a millimeter from his exposed and vulnerable testicle. "Yeowwh!" the boy yelled. The middle-aged killer merely twisted the implement like he would a knife, and slowly pulled it out.

Sean joined in with his own needle a moment later, doing the same thing to Gideon's right ball, again, just missing the testicle. "Yeowwh!" Gideon was bawling now, as this second needle was slowly inserted, then extracted, then inserted again. Russ tried a larger-bore serrated needle, and attacked the middle of the boy's ballsack, close to its geographic center, near a tiny ridge in the soft yet extremely sensitive skin. Both of them created several droplets of blood from the puncture wounds. From there, the torturers moved on to the 7th grader's cock. Within a moment, the screaming boy had five large-bore needles sticking into his cockhead and surrounding his peehole. All the needles had been pushed nearly all the way through Gideon's penis in a savage way, so that only their wooden handles were visible, the needles embedded to the hilt. Sean carried this brutality a step further. In an impressive move, he began squeezing and palpating the boy's penis, rearranging the needles in a particularly sadistic manner. Russ joined in this game. It was more than a half hour later by the time they stopped. Gideon had screamed himself hoarse. They stopped, but only because the torturers were trying something else.

Sean looked contented and happy when he patiently scratched the entirety of Gideon's cock with a needle, taking a perverted pleasure in 'making rivers' – tiny rivulets of blood from the painful scratches that during the next forty-five minutes covered every spot on the nearly 13-year-old's circumcised cock – from the once again well-marked glans all the way down the sensitive underside to the base, not far from Gideon's fledgling pubes. Russ then followed with a similar penile mutilation, although not permanent either as the rules allowed, his cuts were deeper and the 7th grader's penis was soon looking like a bloody sausage, although prettier and not so thick as a man's organ. Entertaining screams weren't heard for a while, as Gideon was still hoarse, until the needles began to play with his beautiful feet. His expressions were evident, indicating severe if not excruciating pain.

Flanged needles were the preferred weapon here. First, Sean attacked the tops of Gideon's soft boy's feet, scratching and gouging near the toenails but lower on each toe, and between each toe on first the boy's left then right foot, and finding more tender meat on the rest of the foot-top's surface area, left and right, and slowly traveling their cruel points near the edges of the pubescent's insteps where top meets sole.

The toenails were next, the nail bed beneath each toe becoming a project for both Russ and Sean, taking turns, much like Jeffers and Paulie had, models of civility between each other. This team took an entire hour to merely torment beneath each of Gideon's ten toenails. Blood was spattered in many places on the crinkly white paper.

"Their patience is amazing," Bruno was heard to remark. But it wasn't just their patience; it was their ability to elicit horrific pain and the synchronicity of it that sounded like a symphony of agony escaping from the beautiful boy's lungs. This facet of Gideon's ordeal was remarked upon almost with a kind of awe by those onlookers present on numerous occasions that afternoon and evening.

The real creativity occurred on Sunday, during the coup de grace. After the Bylaxoil had accomplished its own kind of itchy Hell inside the kid's urethra, the dental picks of first the eager 14-year-old torturer and the alternating 48-year-old reinvigorated serial killer caused a crescendo of nearly constant excruciating pain for the still 12-year-old during a 3-hour-plus ordeal within the ordeal, as Gideon screamed and wailed and bucked, until his feet were bloodied some more with the Sean-held largest bore needles completely penetrating various entry sites on the boy's tender soles and Russ raising the ghastly dental pick triumphantly into the air with the miniature ball-bearing stuck by blood and a few torn pieces of urethral tissue to its sharp and curved tip. When this happened, the gangster's cheers erupted in the room, loud enough to drown out Gideon's most ear-splitting banshee wail.

The rest of the second ordeal #2 ended with Gideon forgotten and moaning in pain as the gangsters celebrated.

By the time Mike the Plumber arrived to fetch his stepson home, the boy was mercifully asleep, or at least unconscious. It was difficult to ascertain which of these states truly existed.

This time it took Gideon longer to recover, Following his second experience of ordeal #2; it was almost two weeks before he could walk without a limp and more than three weeks, twenty-seven days to be exact, before he could pee straight without pain, strain, and blood in his urine.

But he returned to his junior high after just thirteen days, tired of spending time in his bedroom with the people who lived there in close proximity, although at least Mike the Plumber had the good grace not to rape him again while he was recuperating. Track was no longer a possibility; the heartbroken boy was officially cut from the team.

As for the boy's prolonged absences, these remained a mystery to school administrators, although an investigation wasn't even considered in a junior high student body of nearly 800.

Two days past his 13th birthday, it was time for Gideon to once again be reclaimed by those peopling the Dorchester rackets. It was yet another Friday evening, and some of the assembled gangsters presented the birthday boy with slightly belated gifts intended for the occasion. Three model kits, including one depicting a Cadillac Seville that Shadrock Shitley actually owned, another brand new Boston Celtics uniform shirt, and of all things, a tabby cat kitten; Bruno had promised Gideon that he could take it home on Sunday evening – comprised the thoughtful gifts. By the time he'd sipped his now ritualistic ginger ale before going to sleep on Friday night, he was adjusting to the inevitability of yet another painful morrow.

Gideon once again lay obediently on the gangster-owned medical examination table covered by crinkly white paper, his left arm tethered up in the air as he lay positioned on his stomach without a shirt of any kind. His young physique was entering puberty's early stages, with muscle now evident on the boy's bare back, although no body hair was evident except for the merest of blonde underarm wisps, visible upon close inspection. Remarked Shadrock to Keith, "This is one good-looking kid. He'll have women all over him."

The final of three ordeal #1 experiences began for Gideon Belle. The boy felt the jab of a large bore needle as it entered the tender skin of his side, along his ribs. Mr. Needles really enjoyed causing the yearling pain, and grinned every time he was able to elicit a shriek or a whimper. "You'll be thanking me for being so thorough next month," he said to Gideon. One medium-bore sharp needle coursed along the 13-year-old middle back, and buried itself for a distance of more than a foot [30 cm] at a horizontal depth of about ½ inch [12 mm] below the boy's epidermis; Shitley dallied with this one needle for more than forty minutes before it was slowly and quite painfully extracted.

Sunday featured needles being thrust into the boy's naked chest and belly; at one point during the afternoon session, the boy's full weight was dangled from a matrix of interlaced needles of various bores as Mr. Needles tested the young teen's skin for its 'elasticity,' a torment once endured by Amerindian boys coming of age in more spiritually-oriented rituals. Shitley couldn't be faulted for a lack of creativity when it came to torturing Gideon. When this last of the #1 ordeals ended on Sunday evening, Mike the Plumber noticed the boy looked to have survived in better shape than in previous ordeals. "That wasn't so bad, now was it?" he opined to his stepson.

Gideon looked squarely at this person who had raped him on several occasions and said. "No, it wasn't so bad. But it would be better if they'd done stuck needles in you this weekend. I would have wanted a front row seat."

"You can dream pretty boy!" said the Plumber.

During the month leading up to Gideon's final experience of ordeal #2, he lapsed into a serious depression. The kitten died. His teachers at the junior high noticed that the 7th grader had grown listless and inattentive, and he was losing interest in his studies. No one could figure it out. Finally, Gideon's science teacher sent a note home to the boy's criminally complicit and abusive caretakers. Calling his mother and stepfather 'parents' seems like a misnomer. Gideon didn't know that his father Sam had made several attempts to regain more liberal visitation, and had even applied for custody, which was already on record. Because communication had been severed, the boy assumed his father had given up and forgotten about his son.

But when the note from the science teacher came home, Gideon was punished with a comprehensive strapping on his nude backside (neck to heels) and also on his nude frontside (chest to shins), after which he was unceremoniously and brutally raped while his heartless biological mother watched and laughed. The next morning, aching all over and covered with new bruises and welts from the strap, as well as being torn anally from the sexual assault, he trudged slowly and painfully to school. Incredibly, not a single adult at the junior high expressed interest or concern – or even sent Gideon to the school nurse.

Two weeks later, it was time for his more serious ordeal #2, to be endured one last time. Knowing it was the last one, the 13-year-old wanted to get it over with. What he couldn't know, is that this time the 'dentists' would introduce a diabolical twist to the proceedings.

The attendance at this final event was quite a crowd, perhaps 75 gangsters jammed into the condo style place in the South Boston projects. Mike D'Ambroglio dropped his stepson off at the den of iniquity around 7 p.m. on that fateful Friday. Gideon walked in of his own accord after Bruno opened the massive door – his gait proved a great deal more chipper than the one he'd be walking out with some forty-eight hours hence. A lot of bad things can happen to a boy in forty-eight hours. This time, besides the ginger ale, he took a ham and cheese sandwich. He couldn't bear to watch the track & field channel anymore because of the toll that had been stolen from his body, especially when he pondered his oft-tortured feet, so he watched shows like Law and Order and CSI and Without a Trace – all staples of the crime-obsessed American viewing audiences, before growing sleepy and reluctantly giving up consciousness for about eight hours.

He woke up surprisingly and perhaps deceptively refreshed from his sleep, and not knowing the nouveau twists awaiting, thought to himself, 'bring it on,' wanting to survive this latest inevitable round of pain, and put it behind him. Following his morning ablutions, the 13-year-old was soon tethered lying on his back atop the crinkly paper-covered medical examination table, again wearing the despicable shirt emblazoned with Please hurt me. Make me suffer! Gideon was appropriately nude from the waist down, wearing no pants or underwear and of course barefoot, in a room full of clothed and expectant adults milling about.

"It's more crowded today," he remarked casually to Bruno, one of his keepers and as always a trusted Shitley henchman. The boy seemed resigned to his final ordeal, aware that it would be rigorous, but although he couldn't be called a masochist in any sense, he was preparing himself mentally and emotionally to endure it. He was completely blindsided with the innovations that were about to be added to the program, certain refinements in cruelty that would boggle his adolescent imagination for years to come.

The last pair of 'dentists' strode into the gangster room with the medical examination table and Gideon lying upon it as if he were a patient. The crowd of expectant underworld figures was too large to provide seats for everyone, and so standing men parted to let the final tormenting 'team' past, as if they were a component of the Red Sea, which in a purely figurative sense, if not also a literal one, they were. Gideon, conscious and alert, was formally introduced to those who would complete the competition designed to cause him pain.

"Gideon, this is Mr. Thorne, and he's joined by Lefty O'Doul. They'll be conducting your last ordeal #2 this weekend," barked Shadrock Shitley, a human monstrosity in the flesh. It was Gideon's flesh that would suffer. Everyone knew the rules. Thank God there were rules.

R. Thorne, as he was known in criminal circles, was a professional maimer. Not a hitman or murderer in the literal sense, although he'd turned more than sixty human targets into wheelchair-bound cripples, if not also paraplegics. Now in his mid-forties with a receding hairline, his specialty was feet. He had perfect white teeth, and eyes a pretty hazel-green, as well as a dimpled chin that made him look a bit like an everyman. His specialty was maiming feet, often making them unserviceable forever. A fan of Medieval torture techniques, he was a kindred spirit, if not directly descended from Gallio Mercedio, the Italian inventor of the infamous Boot, a helpmate of the Inquisition in which a victim's feet were encased and bones and muscle and tissue and toenails were crushed into a fleshy pulp. Tens of thousands of confessed and unrepentant heretics were maimed in this fashion while tarantulas danced maniacally in the narrow running cobblestone sewers called streets, back in those faraway days. Thorne was a specialist in the art of maiming feet, a dubious talent which had earned him worldwide ill repute. Besides the criminal underworld, he'd worked for the KGB and CIA. The techniques he employed were sometimes ingenious, and often excruciatingly painful. He could use a knife, spoon or fork to amputate toes. He enjoyed applying fire to burn flesh off bones. A foot-bath of sulfuric acid could achieve similar results, and pliers could yank off toenails in the same manner as they'd rip out chunks of flesh. Thorne was an interrogator at heart, and if he couldn't ruin Gideon's feet in the exact way he wanted, he could at least exercise that fear-inspiring option of an interactive Q & A.

Lefty O'Doul, the namesake of a one-time baseball legend, was experienced in all methods of torture, but more of a generalist than his associate R. Thorne. He was married to the sister of Shadrock Shitley's third mistress, one Persephone McBride. O'Doul's red-haired wife was named Mildred and they were currently separated. A giant of a man with incredibly powerful hands, he was also a murderous thug, known in underworld circles as 'The Boston Strangler.' Unlike Albert Desalvo, however, he remained unknown to the public.

The examination began with the loathsome Thorne idly running his sadistic fingers down Gideon's bare legs, still sprouting only downy blonde hairs as his puberty had hardly advanced, down to the boy's quite vulnerable feet.

"Ever maim a boy?" Bruno asked him, ostensibly out of curiosity.

Thorne turned his pretty hazel-green orbs in Bruno's direction. His reply was candid. "I'd like to maim this one," he said, as the intelligent Gideon whimpered, "but I recognize the rules. As for your question, six; I can remember maiming six boys of this age or a bit older." Gideon shivered in pure fright.

O'Doul commenced with the initial procedure, as Thorne was still preoccupied with fondling the 7th grader's beautiful feet, although they were slightly scarred and showed healed wounds from two and four months before.

Lifting Gideon's demonstrative shirt, he began fondling the boy's penis and ballsack, although his giant paws were surprisingly gentle. "How old is this boy?" O'Doul asked, expressing a genuine interest.

Keith, Shitley's associate, replied. "He's 13 years and 1 month."

"He's got a nice circumcised cock on him. He's starting his little blonde pubes nicely and has well-hung balls." Gideon was beyond embarrassment by this stage. It was the pain and damage to his feet and privates that he cared about most.

O'Doul was becoming enthused about torturing Gideon's genitals. He grabbed the boy's cock by its sensitive glans and started twisting hard enough so that the 7th grader grimaced. "Excellent reaction," he observed.

Meanwhile, Thorne was testing the toes on the boy's left foot for sensitivity. He started out by pressing hard with longer-than-usual fingernails, using the nails of his thumb and index finger. He was making little red marks on each toe, causing Gideon to grimace again. "His feet are sensitive too," Thorne said.

O'Doul and Thorne each took out their decks of special torture cards. Each card was numbered one, two, or three. They explained how the game would be played. This instruction was meant not only for the 13-year-old about to be tortured, but for the capacity-plus crowd in the condo. These guys were real professionals and knew a thing or two about entertainment.

"It's easy boy," Thorne the everyman began, "Every card is numbered 1, 2, or 3. I'm holding the 'feet' deck which consists of 52 different punishments for your feet involving needles. All you have to do is guess 1, 2, or 3 as I pick a card. If you don't pick or if you pick wrong, you get the punishment I've selected times three – repeated three times. If you guess correctly, you only get the punishment I've chosen – once – but there's a catch. You have to clearly yell out the punishment you'll be receiving by reading the card. If you hesitate, you get the punishment done five times in succession. All punishments selected will be done first to your right foot, followed by your left. Understand boy?"

Gideon was horrified. He thought he understood the directions, although they did involve a learning curve while he'd been under considerable duress. Tentatively, he nodded.

"We're going to alternate," O'Doul said. "During both today and tomorrow's sessions we'll be alternating. I'm holding a similar deck showing 52 punishments involving your cock and balls. Jokers will be for inserting Bylaxoil into your piss-slit. I'm saving the dental pick coup de grace card for last, so that it conforms to the schedule and we will be using some extra Q-tips coated with the irritant prior to that event, which I'm told is referred to as the 'hunt' for buried treasure."

Applause and considerable laughter erupted. Gideon started crying softly, but tried to stifle his sobs, remembering where he was.

"That's very thoughtful," Shadrock Shitley said.

"Same rules will apply to the cock and ball deck. If you guess 1, 2, or 3 correctly, you'll only get the punishment once, but you will have to read the card loud enough for everyone to hear you, while clearly enunciating every word and not hesitating before you start to read. Understand Gideon?"

"Yes sir." This time he felt like he understood. But this was the ghastliest game a boy ever played. A few moments later, after the crowd had settled and grew expectant, the game began.

"Pick a number," Thorne intoned.

Gideon realized that whatever he picked, his feet would be tortured and it would be very painful. If he guessed wrong, he wouldn't have to read out his punishment, but the penalty would kick in, Gideon mused. They'd do the fucking punishment a total of five times on each of his bare feet. Worse, he wouldn't know what the punishment was prior to experiencing it because he hadn't read the card.

If he guessed correctly, he'd have to read the fucking punishment out loud. But he'd only get it once on each foot, which was 'sweet' by comparison. What number should he pick? He had no idea which was worst, or if each number was equally bad.

"Two," Gideon yelled loudly and clearly as the gangsters murmured expectantly.

Thorne selected a card with its number printed large near the top and the easy-to-read punishment underneath. He showed the card to the boy, placing it near his head so he could easily read it.

Gideon felt a surge of relief when he saw he'd guessed right. He couldn't fail to suppress a grin when he realized he'd won. But when he began to read his first punishment, and saw the way it was worded, and exactly what he was expected to read, the 7th grader emitted an audible gasp, almost a squeal. I can't, the boy mused, I just can't. But I have to.

"Are you going to read your punishment now in a nice loud voice so that I can inflict it?" Thorne was insistent and vicious; what else could the boy have expected from a serial maimer in such a situation? The man was twisted.

"I-I – will," Gideon said, attempting to stall.

"We're all waiting." Murmurs of agreement buzzed through the assemblage in the gangster lair.

The 7th grader saw the words. He was certainly a decent reader. But the problem was, he knew what they meant, in terms of damage to his feet, and in terms of pain. He knew exactly what the words meant. But finally, he resigned himself to the inevitable, a boy naked below the waist about to undergo this ordeal #2, as Shadrock Shitley called it, one last time. It was that thought, the finality of his suffering to be first endured, and then being over with forever, that convinced the boy to read the words on the evil card culled from a stacked deck.

The blonde-haired 13-year-old began to say the words in a loud, yet tremulous voice.

"Please take a big needle and use it to connect all my toes, so that the instrument of my pain pierces my skin and goes all the way through all my toes on my left foot."

Gideon began sobbing. He paused in his reading.

"Isn't there a little more written on the card? Read the rest of it boy."

In between sobs, he was bawling now, and the boy continued his recitation.

"Do it slowly, very slowly, so that it really hurts. Make me suffer."

"Now read the last part."

"When you're done with my toes on my left foot wait a minute or so, so I can think about it, and start with a slightly bigger needle on the toes of my right foot. Connect each one in the same way, and do it just as slowly so it really hurts. Don't worry about any bleeding."

Gideon was beside himself with fear. The ordeal performed in this manner was a hundred times worse. It would take forever too – or at least would seem that way.

"Good. We'll comply with your request and suggestions, boy." Thorne reached for the first needle, a serrated medium-bore point, sharp enough to penetrate Gideon's toes if a strong man slowly pushed the point through resisting flesh.

When the needle began pricking his skin on the left foot's small toe, it began hurting. As the needle continued its inexorable progress, the pain steadily increased. The needle needed to travel little more than a quarter-inch [5 mm] through that first toe, but to Gideon it felt like a mile. It must have taken about ten minutes as the 7th grader's bare foot was held fast by several strong hands so that the boy couldn't squirm too much, but the needle eventually emerged out the toe's other side, causing the boy's screaming to turn into a wail, incessant and of a high-pitched intensity. But Thorne, wearing a sadistic grin and a visage of focused concentration, kept pushing the needle into the flesh of the next toe, a slightly larger and beautiful 13-year-old boy's toe. Gideon kept screaming, which was music to the ears of most of those assembled, as the needle continued its journey, very slowly, a tortuous path through human flesh. The pain hardly abated when the needle emerged again, like a storm passing through an isthmus, with the toe space comparable to water, and the toes themselves 'land,' and neither did the boy's wails of distress, and the needle kept pushing, guided by a monster man's fingers, until the toes were almost done, the large toe remaining, and the needle passed inexorably through it as well. Blood was seeping, more than a few drops, from the entry and exit wounds, onto the white crinkly paper, reddening it in the manner that surgery might. The needle's sharp serrated point began piercing Gideon's big toe on his left foot, and that single procedure took nearly twenty minutes to accomplish.

"Time for your right foot now," Thorne said, with a smug smile etched onto his cruel features like a clown's mask.

O'Doul had the 'other' deck at the ready. Thorne had pulled out the 'toe needles' quickly and abruptly so that their serrated edges snagged on the newly injured tissue of all ten toes, making the boy scream and holler anew.

"He has a good pair of lungs," remarked Bruno, Shitley's burly associate.

But now it was O'Doul's turn to make the boy scream. He gently lifted up Gideon's shirt and began reinspecting the kid's cock and balls, so far undamaged from this final ordeal #2, but this was about to change.

"He has a nice little cock," O' Doul said, "and his ballsack is soft and sensitive." The cruel Irishman squeezed the boy's testicles for emphasis, making him squeal. "He can squeal like a little piggie," Lefty remarked. O'Doul returned to a second comment about Gideon's circumcised penis, while fondling it unopposed. "He has a little growth of pubic hairs coming in," he added, "this little boy is growing up into a man."

A round of laughter ensued at the irony of the sentence. Gideon felt a measure of embarrassment suddenly mingled with his pervasive feeling of dread.

But the relative niceties were about to end, as O'Doul picked his first card from the other deck for the boy to read. Again the boy guessed right. "Three."

He held up the awful card for the 7th grader to inspect and read what was written on its face. Again, there was too much of a pause for everyone's liking – with one exception.

"Read." O'Doul shouted, his voice acquiring just the trace of a brogue. There was menace in that intonation so that the 13-year-old didn't dare dally.

"Please 3; select your biggest and nastiest needles, four of them, and use them to slowly pierce the head of my cock

(Gideon began sobbing again at the word 'cock')

all the way through – from the tip to the base. Be careful about one thing and one thing only – don't pierce my piss-slit – as that part needs to get punished later."

The boy was quietly sobbing as he realized the significance of the words he'd just read and the pain he was about to experience.

"Isn't there a little twist 3; at the end for you to read to us, boy?"

Gideon knew he wasn't going to be allowed to skip the rest of his recitation. He continued in between his sobs.

"Once the needles are all the way into my cock, I want you to twist and play with them and bend my cock with your fingers so that they'll hurt a lot more."

The blonde-haired kid started on a crying jag until another dose of torturous reality interrupted it.

O'Doul had selected the biggest and nastiest needles, all serrated but only moderately sharp so that they'd be more difficult to push through the boy's penis, starting at his pretty & extremely sensitive pinkish glans, and proceeding nearly four inches [10 cm] to the edge of the kid's bladder. O'Doul would be cautious about penetrating beyond the penile base due to the permanent damage rule, which might disqualify them.

"Okay, hold the kid's cock steady, Bruno," O'Doul instructed. For some reason, he hadn't wanted Thorne to assist in this particular punishment; preferring that he 'stick to fucking up the kid's feet' as much as inhumanly possible.

Gideon grimaced and whimpered when he felt the first tentative prick of the needle on his tender glans, the sensitive head of his penis from which both his piss and cum and now his blood would flow. It was nearly a quarter-inch [5 mm] around, the needle, and had all sorts of sharp edges. The only good thing for the boy was that it wasn't curved, like that hideous dental pick. But when Lefty began using the strong fingers of his left hand to push the needle through, Gideon almost fainted. Immediately administered a dose of smelling salts, the boy remained conscious and didn't miss a second of yet another round of excruciating torment.

The first needle began gouging the boy's glans, penetrating very slowly, ever deeper into the organ, as Bruno patiently and dutifully held Gideon's cock fast, again in an effort to prevent undue squirming. He'd decided to wear earplugs to block out the boy's anguished cries which were as could be expected unrelenting. The second needle pierced about a half-inch [12 mm] distant, also along the periphery of the boy's glans, and so did the third and fourth moments later in their due. After the needles had penetrated and the entry wounds in the 13-year-old's wounded glans were oozing blood, the play began, a type of cruel game, somewhat ritualistic in nature, and the manipulations and the series of needle extractions and re-insertions which seemed in the main designed and intended to cause excruciating torment. Gideon was kept conscious throughout until he again screamed himself hoarse, and when this particular penile torment mercifully ended it was time to begin anew on the boy's tender and exquisite feet. Thorne was invariably ready to proceed with a multitude of his own 'card tricks' from the stacked deck that the 13-year-old was obliged to read when he won, but it was far worse when he didn't get to read, and in any case Gideon screamed himself hoarse as he endured.

Sunday's events ended with the Bylaxoil up the piss-slit and the tiny ball-bearing, and success again, eureka! But in the end, Gideon had to be helped to the car and was so enfeebled that even Mike the Plumber showed a tiny measure of concern for his stepson as he gave him a burly shoulder to lean on. Gideon felt weak and nauseous from pain, as his feet and penis were still throbbing, but with his last piece of pluck he managed to glare at this dim-witted quasi-human, possibly a mammal, who had set up the circumstances for his ordeals – all six of them – in the first place. Gideon glared, then slipped off into a welcome sleep.

Six weeks later, Gideon was still recuperating. He missed three weeks of junior high never quite catching up; once his step dad entered his room drunk with intentions to rape again, when the enraged 13-year-old clubbed Michael D'Ambroglio over the head with his nearly forgotten Louisville Slugger, a last vestige of normalcy left over from Little League. Little League, literally memories; his real dad Sam Belle used to go to all his games when he was ten. That seemed like a lifetime ago to Gideon, but it was only three years. One night Gideon drank some whisky and mixed it with some pills. It was a friend of his drug-crazed mother who found him accidentally; deciding on a whim to check on the boy. Rushed to South Boston Memorial, he recovered, but word reached Sam.

Sam Belle had been attempting to gain sole custody for more than a year, but the boy's suicide attempt, a plea for help that even a family court judge could understand, got things moving. Massachusetts Social Services, specifically its Department of Youth and Families, finally intervened. Several home visits later, a miracle happened. It was decided. Something good for Gideon and for Sam Belle too; the boy moved in with his real dad.

Their reunion was bittersweet. It wasn't like a movie when a DYF nine-passenger van used for the transport of foster kinder, as the Dutch might say, dropped off the reticent boy at his father's cozy & refurbished gray-brown siding-covered home in Lawrence that he'd just purchased a mortgage on. Gideon got out of the car and Sam Belle, all smiles and gladness at welcoming his beloved son with an affectionate hug, felt his own smile fade when his 13-year-old son, now five months past that fateful birthday and its dubious celebration in a gangster lair, when the boy's response was lukewarm at best, a half-hearted reciprocal embrace, and a whisper of alienation in his real dad's ear assuming the form of a question; 'Where were you Dad?' But Gideon didn't shed a tear, not then.

The boy ended 7th grade a month or two later. He limped through his schoolwork, and limped literally, his feet now scarred almost to the extent his psyche was.

There was good news. "You passed 7th grade," Sam said, "Let's go out to dinner and celebrate." They ate Chinese in Boston's Chinatown; the man ordering spicy fare and the boy staying bland. Little was said between them. Sam knew about the rapes and what had happened at home with the despicable practices of his ex-wife and Mike the Plumber; the social worker had never mentioned any of the rest and perhaps it was all locked within the shell that had become Gideon. "Don't press the boy," the social worker Emilie Shitley had said, "It may be too painful for him and drive him into psychosis." Sam didn't want that, so he kept a smidgen of distance figuring that the abuse at the hands and other anatomical parts of his step-father had put Gideon into this shadow state of being that he barely recognized. Sam was constantly making comparisons in his head to the boy he'd known even a year before; an extroverted, happy-go-lucky, extraordinarily motivated and resilient kid who made Sam glad he was alive for the privilege of just being Gideon's dad.

This Gideon spent an incredible amount of time in his room; reading, playing loud music, primarily bands like Crushed Pineapple and the Cranberries – it sounds like a fruit salad in there, Sam would find himself musing.

Sam urged Gideon to go out for sports. "I should enter you in a 5K for your age group, there are several races coming up," he said one morning, before heading off to work in a skating rink. It was summer but Sam drove a Zamboni because he possessed the skill, and because jobs were few in the Bush-led America. Kids and especially high schoolers skated and played hockey year-round.

When Sam mentioned the foot races, the boy reacted with rage, an extreme burst of anger. He hardly limped anymore, was walking better, almost normally, but Sam never saw his son barefoot, the 13-year-old had become extremely shy about his physicality, he invariably wore slippers and socks when he went sans shoes in the elder Belle's presence.

"No," he screamed, "I can't run anymore. It's over!"

His father got him a new TV for his room, a digital flat screen that received one hundred and twenty channels, including the Major League Baseball network. The boy started watching an incredible amount of television. One day, he came out from his room and surprised his father. "Dad, c'mon," the boy said, with a certain enthusiasm. Gideon went with his dad to a sporting goods outlet in a nearby mall. The boy wanted New Balance athletic shoes and a Rawlings leather baseball glove. "I want to try out," he told his dad. Sam was only too eager to comply.

It was for the Braves, the Pony League version, for 13-15 year-olds. He'd noticed a listing for tryouts on a community service channel spliced in among the more attractive programming. Gideon tried out for 'outfielder' and practiced fielding ground balls, shagging flies in the outfield, taking his licks at the plate. He appeared lithe and coordinated enough to the coaches evaluating him, and a few days later, a miracle happened. He made the team! Gideon sat the bench mostly but did occasionally get to sprint after a ball or two in the outfield. He ran twice when he made contact with the ball, singling to centerfield and doubling to right. He winced when he legged out the double, and another time when he made a fantastic shoestring catch running in towards the infield on a weak pop fly that otherwise would have blooped in. But he discovered that he could do it. He could do it! He could do it! The clincher was when Gideon overheard the opposing coach of the Pirates say "That Belle kid is fast! He's born to run, that boy."

That night at home Sam Belle overheard his son crying loudly in his room, sobbing in breath-catching gasps. He knocked on Gideon's bedroom door, and this time when his father hugged him, Gideon's response was a genuine embrace amid a lot of tears that kept on keeping on. It was like a dam had burst. Gideon told his father everything he remembered, every horrific detail.

Sam felt a sense of maniacal rage. Those bastards had no right to hurt his son like that. No right at all. Mike the Plumber was in Walpole for the sexual predations he'd perpetrated, so he couldn't get back at that bastard. He found a gun in a hidden place. Bullets too. Gideon watched with horror as he saw his beloved father get in the Chevy Impala. Amazingly, like Gideon, it still could run. Gideon opened the back door and hopped into the back seat. His father was so blinded with rage, he didn't stop the boy.

Gideon wasn't sure at first where they were going. The car moved fast towards the huge city to the south, and finally south of it, towards Dorchester and the projects where Shadrock Shitley and the rest of them might be. Gideon felt that same sense of mindless dread and almost a physical pain comparable to what he'd endured and tried so hard to forget. Now he was sorry that he'd told his father so many details. "Dad, don't," Gideon pleaded.

"My mind's made up." The anger his father was feeling couldn't help but be palpable to the son. When they reached the projects, he asked Gideon for directions. The boy reluctantly told his father, "Left," and "Right," and "Quick Left," escaped the 13-year-old's lips, and the words sounded almost like mouth-farts, rancid and Shitley in the extreme, and the forced passages he'd been forced to recite from the playing cards came flooding back like a form of cerebral diarrhea. Ugly images of Thorne and O'Doul accompanied these thoughts. Gideon's face turned a shade of purple as he too grew angrier, wanting desperately for the only person he loved and trusted to avenge him once and for all. It was like he'd given his father tacit approval at that point to kill, and perhaps to keep on killing until everybody who had hurt him was dead.

Suddenly they were there. Sam Belle's gun was loaded. He got out of the car. Gideon got out too. The boy recognized a vehicle and realized that someone was there, in the condo. Abruptly, the enormity of what they were doing smacked the boy full-bore in the face, piercing him like 3; like 3; like 3; a needle.

"Don't do it Dad! They'll fucking kill you!" The scream was enough to jolt Sam back into the land of reason. Someone peeked out a window and saw the father and son embracing and hugging, tears all over the place, cascading enough to create a summer storm, as thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. It was Shitley himself, but Gideon failed to see the man he'd once called 'Mr. Needles.'

Mr. Lawrence had come to see Gideon run. He was an 8th grader now, the star of the Lawrence Raiders and their cross-country track team. Mr. Lawrence came up to Lawrence all the way from Dorchester; still amiable, still rooting for the boy. Gideon Belle was a runner on the rise. He'd already won seven races, and was on the verge of making all-state, a cinch to make the high school team the following year.

Mr. Lawrence was having a conversation with Mr. Mason, Gideon's new coach, in the stands. They were sitting in the stands, front-row seats adjacent to the finish line. The topic was Gideon Belle. "He's a real natural," Coach Mason said, matter-of-factly, "But what I find most amazing about this kid is his stamina, and his resilience, and he has that intangible that all great runners have."

"What's that?" Coach Lawrence couldn't help asking.

"It usually develops much later, God knows how he got it, but I've been seeing this special-ness all season, every time he's battling adversity."

"What are you seeing?"

"He seems to have an extraordinary capacity to endure pain. Nothing fazes him; absolutely nothing."

Gideon was coming down the home stretch, well out in front, in clear view of both coaches.

Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. The boy stepped into an imperfection, possibly a tiny indentation, causing him to lose his pure stride.

"Oh no," Coach Lawrence said aloud.

Something more amazing happened, as Coach Mason watched, grinning from ear to ear.

"Why are you smiling? The kid just turned his ankle! It has to be bad."

Gideon grimaced. Hardly missing a beat, his sturdy dependable feet continued pounding the red cinder track with a monotonous regularity. A red-headed boy had gained a meter or two, but now finished a distant second.

Gideon crossed the finish line, actually gaining after spraining. Finally slowing to a limping walk, he smiled broadly at his two coaches, and at his beloved dad, who was sitting alone two rows up but right behind them. "That's my boy!" he yelled loud enough to embarrass a lot of sons.

The End