by John Everson
NEEDLES & SINS
BY JOHN EVERSON
DIGITAL EDITION
NECRO PUBLICATIONS
2011
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NEEDLES & SINS © 2007by Edward Lee
Cover art © 2007 by Travis Anthony Soumis
This digital edition © 2011 Necro Publications
Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
a Necro Publication
5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771
http://www.necropublications.com
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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“Needles & Sins” © 2007
“Something Inside” © 2007
“The Strong Will Survive” © 2005 First appeared in Space & Time Magazine #99, Spring 2005
“The Beginning Was the End” © 2004 First appeared in Black October Magazine #6, Fall 2004
“Letting Go” © 2007
“The Char-Lee” © 2007
“Bloodroses” © 2000 First appeared in Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000)
“Made For Each Other” © 2004 First appeared in Feral Fiction Online, September 2004.
“Spirits Having Flown” © 2003 First appeared in MOTA III: Courage anthology, (Triple Tree Publishing, 2003)
“Warming the Women” © 1996 First appeared in The 1995 SPGA Showcase anthology, (SPGA, 1996)
“Mary” © 2002 First appeared in Dark Testament anthology (Delirium Books, 2002)
“Green Green Glass” © 2004 First appeared in DAMNED: An Anthology of the Lost (Necro, 2004)
“The Devil's Platoon” © 2007 First appeared in A Dark & Deadly Valley anthology (Silverthought Press, 2007)
“Mutilation Street” © 2001 First appeared in Bloodytype CD-ROM anthology (Lone Wolf, 2001)
“And Then Some” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“After the Fifth Step” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“Birth and Death” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“You Never Got Used to the Needle” © 2007
“Irrelevant in Anathzebra” © 2007
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For Shaun
Who Loves a Good Bedtime Story
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Charlee Jacob
Needles & Sins
Something Inside
The Strong Will Survive
The Beginning Was the End
Letting Go
The Char-Lee
Bloodroses
Made For Each Other
Spirits Having Flown
Warming the Women
Mary
Green Green Glass
The Devil’s Platoon
Mutilation Street
LOVE & SEX & ROPE & SCREAMS:
A CIRCUS IN FIVE ACTS
And Then Some
After the Fifth Step
Birth and Death
You Never Got Used to the Needle
Irrelevant in Anathzebra
About the Author
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INTRODUCTION
This introduction to Needles & Sins will be less literary and more informal than some introductions. This is because John Everson’s latest collection pulls such a diverse range of emotions from me.
I couldn’t have been happier or more honored to be asked to write the introduction for one of my favorite modern horror authors…not to mention one of my best friends. This doesn’t make me biased. Just pissed I hadn’t written these stories myself.
John Everson has produced a variety of tales which will neither bore nor grow stale with the telling. His prose is whatever it needs to be for the piece: raw and shocking, bitingly tender with traps, rich yet always believable. His knowledge, feel and love for the work shows in every line, like the brush strokes of a painter. Yet it is most definitely of the 21st century and hurray for thus. Writers should step up and create from a new millennial gut. Times change and good writers aren’t sheep…no matter how wicked they pretend to be while attending a convention. If you write RAW, you aren’t shy. You know rules were made to be broken—unless all you want is a cozy buck. John says what he means and means what he says. Ought to have been born a Texan. (Oops. Sorry.)
And to see him, he’s so adorable. A true gentleman. He is a Renaissance man: author, musician and composer, critic and artist. But the gentleman in the right shadow reveals a delicious flint in his eyes, suggesting a well-healed surgeon out slumming in London’s old East End.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like John Everson. Well, there is this one creep who is ostentatiously jealous of John’s many talents. May this varmint rot in a bilge stew of vomit-feathers and excreta-caked love beads found crammed into either end of a dead tramp cut in half by a rodent train in the meth back alleys of Dallas.
(Um, let me shake myself a little. Whew! That feels better!)
Now let me make a few comments about the book, Needles & Sins. I won’t mention every story. I want you to explore for yourself. Bring waders—it can be treacherously deep in Everson waters.
The first is “Needles And Sins.” This hurt me in more places than I thought I had. It is about suffering and abuse, and either you’ve been there or you haven’t. Either way the story is moving…dreamily, nightmarishly toward a spot in the soul that never quite gets filled.
John uses “Bloodroses,” a reprint I still love. It is a touching story, some of it in places you would never want to be touched. Depends, I suppose, on your tolerance for kinky. This story makes me cry (probably due to 13 prescription medications and an opioid patch—ain’t modern science scary?) and still gives me nightmares. It also makes me cringe at the sight and scent of roses.
Then there is “The Char-Lee.” What can I say as I blush? I love a tale that turns me into a real…
Sacrifices. They are like candy and flowers. Just not roses. “Her flesh wept with the tears of a thousand fickle knife-kisses…” Ouch! Oh! My…
“Mutilation Street” is just too much grisly sinful fun for anyone one nostril short of a good blood-red line. I laughed pounds off. I love Stupid Bitch.
“Warmin’ the Women” sure ain’t the Boy’s Town Spencer Tracy knew. Not so sure about Mickey Rooney.
“Mary” I don’t know if I would have dared. But I wish I had: “…Mary panicked, struggled against the lulling torpor of his sensual valium.”
I have done many stories about circuses and/or special people. This book derives almost a quarter of its content from the final five interwoven stories under the big top of LOVE & ROPE & SEX & SCREAMS: A CIRCUS IN FIVE ACTS. This is a wonderful quintet, especially to close such an amazing collection with.
The Big Death is popular now, full of religion, end times, and all its big hair. Because we have just done the last century and millennium and have girded our loins for the next, perhaps we feel it in the air, a sense of change. Death is change, the ultimate maybe, not necessarily the finale. Here is where writers, fools, and seers enter the picture, giving us shivers with options, maybe even a
message wrapped in a rattlesnake speaking in tongues. As John writes in the first page of “Letting Go”: “Death was like that. A land of unintended consequences.”
Perhaps the meek (and sheep) shall inherit the earth. But who will get the lands beyond it?
—Charlee Jacob
Texas, 2007
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NEEDLES & SINS
He heard the song before he felt the pain. Just a whisper on the edge of wanton breath. A woman’s breath, light and sweet. She moved in the shadows beyond his head, and the melody lurked just behind the heat of her earthy scent as his eyes struggled to open. To wake to this new place.
That’s when the piercing began. That’s when his eyes snapped open—no longer able to just drowsily think about it—and his body convulsed, and in a flash he saw:
…His chest laid open, a red, gory river snaking its way from somewhere below his neck to his belly button…
…His ribs glittering like a pearly cage of broken bones in the yellow lamplight…
…His gleaming, helpless organs revealed like a deli tray of cannibalistic delights…
…His genitals lolling like broken meat across a slack thigh, spattered with spots of crimson…
…His toes, purpled and bruised, spasming at the end of the table he lay upon…
…A white hand, fingers long and thin, pulling a long, hooked needle through the far end of the fatal gash near his belly and trailing an almost invisible fleshtone thread in the air behind it…
Charles screamed.
The song stopped, and a warm wetness slid across his forehead. Her tongue. A kiss. “Shhhhh,” the liquid voice intoned. “We’ve only just begun.”
“What happened?” he moaned, biting his tongue harder and harder until he felt the warmth of blood pass his lips as the woman’s thread passed lower, through his torn flesh. He struggled to remember, but nothing would come. “Why am I so torn up?”
She whispered two words in answer. “You lived.”
The needle dipped into a bowl of liquid near his ribs, and came out dripping golden rain in the weak light. Then it moved to touch the hamburger of his abdomen again. “Remember your wife?” the voice coaxed, and in a flash, he saw Sharlene circa age 32, just as she was trying her damnedest to make it work between them…
“Whatever you want,” his wife moaned in the shadows of 2 a.m. He grinned, a lust-shark in the blood-scented water of twilight and pushed her face down, down to the place where he knew Sharlene hated, where he knew she would feel defiled and humiliated, to the place that would haunt her dreams with feelings of self loathing and inadequacy. He knew all about her inner demons, but at that deep-sea moment he didn’t care, not then, not when he knew what could come, or cum, of it… “Yes,” he grinned. “Suck it good.”
The pain jolted him from the memory, an electric cattle prod.
He tried to push away from the table with his arms, but nothing moved. He was helpless beneath her song, and her needle. “Goddamnit!” he cried.
“Oh…he did,” the whispering woman agreed with his curse. Again her needle left his torso, trailed blood-slick thread high in the air and descended to the bowl to be baptized with a splash of…something. And once cleansed of the stain of his gut, the needle hooked through his skin once more.
“What about your son,” the perfumed breath whispered over his eyelids. “Did you love him?”
««—»»
Barry looked up from the hole he’d dug in the yard in panic. “Dad, I didn’t mean to ruin the grass, honest, I was just looking for locusts, you know, that might have nests that got buried…”
His hand slapped the boy’s face almost without thinking. The boy needed to learn. Learn to respect property, people. How dare he just start digging a hole in the middle of the lawn that had just been resodded a month ago? Barry had to learn…
Charles’ hand came down again, clipping the boy in the lip and cuffing his head. In that moment, the sweet, wet-lipped infant he’d once cradled in his arms metamorphed into a foul stain on his white sheets. In Charles’ heart, Barry became nothing more than a nuisance, a delinquent, a problem, problem, problem child that had locked him down to a life he never wanted…
“Dad, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” Barry begged, tears already staining the dust on his face as he scrambled away from the pile of broken grass and muddy earth and launched his feet in a scramble for the house where mom and safety lie. But Charles’ hand caught the hem of his shirt and yanked him off balance.
Charles right hand came down. “I’ll show you sorry…”
“He needed to learn to respect property!”
“Of course he did,” the woman whispered. “A broken arm is a good lesson. One he’d remember.”
“I didn’t mean…” Charles started to say, but then broke off to scream as the hook dug into the tight part of his flesh, just above the sternum.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he cried.
“Your life is one long thread. I’m just making you whole,” she said. And she began to hum. He could hear the words in her melody, words about pride, and tears and needles.
“Ohhhh,” he moaned. As the tip dug into the space above his rib, he looked down and saw slack, dead white flesh and sickly black hair curled atop it like leavings. The remains of his day.
“Why did you live alone at the end?” she asked.
The glass was cool against his lips and he smiled in the golden light of its love. Okay, it didn’t love…but it was what he loved. What he needed. He remembered the last time he’d had a woman here, in the tiny space that he’d carved out for himself just off the broken pavement of 8th Avenue. The complex was a last stop for most, but he’d covered the uneven walls of his purloined space with a $10 can of beige paint that he’d watered down to make it go farther and thus had hidden most of the cracks in its distressed drywall. He pretended that he lived in a home and that the soybeans he ate tasted like filet. He’d stuffed blankets in the draughty cracks that separated the walls from the floor and the windows from the walls and most of the time in the winter, he kept the place above 50 degrees. With a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, he could make it feel like the place was warm, while his flesh shivered unheeded in the cold.
The phone rang, and he almost dropped his glass. The phone never rang. Probably just another creditor or solicitor, he thought, brain buzzing with the metallic jolt of whiskey. Still, he answered it, pressing the cool plastic to the scratchy whiskers of his chin. Idly he scratched at the dry skin there as he said, “Yeah? What can I do you for?”
“Dad,” a voice said from a faraway crackle. “I need help.”
“Buy me a beer,” he answered, and laughed as he dropped the phone between two couch cushions. He looked for it squirting in the shadows, but his hand didn’t seem to have the energy to dig between the seams to retrieve it. Instead he fell back and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, he heard a voice calling his name, but he no longer felt like answering…
The needle dug closer, and his eyes shot open, wider than wide in agony. A jet of crimson spurted like a geyser from some lost artery near his heart, and he gagged on the bile that gathered in the pit of his throat. “Stop,” he gagged.
“…the tears I gotta hide,” the woman’s voice whispered, singing along with the tune she’d been humming with every stitch. “Needles and sins,” she laughed softly, and completed the stitch as his body jolted against her hand. “Needles and sins.”
Charles was 16, and glad to be away. He crept through the cattails holding his BB gun like an army rifle. He was ready to use it. That’s when he saw the mouse scurry down the trampled path to disappear into the crumpled mass of stalks and dirt. He kicked off the top of the mound and laughed as momma mouse bolted away from the nest, leaving four pink, hairless babies to sniff and paw at the air, blinded by the unnatural light of the day. He cocked the air socket of the gun, aimed and blew tiny ball bearings through the thin skins of those helpless rodents. One, two, t
hree, four. Tiny circles of blood blotted their purplish bodies, and the mice shuddered and clutched each other as they collapsed onto the matted grass of their once comfortable nest. They couldn’t understand the sudden change in their lives from warmth to pain, but mercifully, they died in seconds, just like the…
The needle plunged deep, drawing its thread tight.
…love that died as Charles lifted his hand for the first time when Gwendolyn told him in the back seat of his Chevy Citation to cut it out, that really hurt and maybe he should try learning some manners the next time before he touched a woman as if she was just another piece of trash for the curb, but he didn’t listen and her spit and blood coated his hand as she turned away in hurt and shame just like the way…
««—»»
The needle dipped into the bowl, and dripping cool sting, slipped inside his flesh again.
…happiness died as Charles looked at his daughter in her prom dress and laughed, saying “who do you think you are, the freakin’ Queen of Siam? Do you think the other kids are going to go out looking like that?” And as Rachel’s face crumbled into a black hole of betrayal…
The needle dripped and stitched, washing his flesh clean of blood as it closed his exposed organs back up within.
… Trust died as Charles promised that he’d be home on time tonight, and instead stopped off, just for one nip, just one, just one more, just a quick last taste…
“Stop, please stop,” he begged.
But she only whispered from behind his head, her voice sweet as spring lilies. “Still they begin,” she said. “Needles and sins.”
