Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  The little girl bent down from heaven to kiss my lips with ghostly warmth. In my ear she whispered one thing as Lichtmann continued to fire again and again into the jerking, jittering corpses of the Devil’s Trinity. My face and hands warmed with the splatter of their death.

  “Thank you,” the waif whispered. “I won’t forget you. I found momma.”

  Before the bodies had fully stilled on the planks, Lichtmann dropped the smoking gun and ran for the door. I was quick to follow, but by the time I rolled from the floor, leapt down the stairs and passed the cowering innkeeper in the dining room on my way out, the private was already lost in the fog. I looked around for him a bit, hoping to thank him for saving my life, and then stumbled myself into the black shadows of the forest once more.

  I lived on berries and streamwater for days. I don’t know where Lichtmann went. I didn’t stick around to thank him, I only knew I had to get as far from Dietz and the devil as I could. When I finally found my way back to a tiny village five days later, I learned that Der Fuhrer had shot himself. Five days before.

  The Reich was done. The troops retreating faster than ever. Ironically, Dietz, and the devil, had apparently been our only hope. Thanks to me, thanks to my weak heart, Germany was now, without any doubt, losing the war.

  But I couldn’t believe that winning a war was worth the life of a child. I pray to God that he agrees. And I pray that he’ll forgive me for my moment of desperation.

  The devil was on our side. And I never want to stand next to him again. Every night I kneel and pray, as the Germany I once knew collapses all around me. I know they’ll never talk about the hundreds of Allied troops who for a couple days, near the dark entrance to the Black Forest, slaughtered each other mercilessly. Nobody will ever talk about the week that Germany almost turned the war around in a fit of blackest magic.

  But now I wonder…what if God was the one on our side, and wanted Hitler to win? How could God have forsaken us so badly that our only hope was Satan? All I can do is pray. Pray that he’ll forgive me for helping to kill the girl. Pray that he’ll forgive me for murdering Dietz. But sometimes, I’m not sure which of my actions to apologize for. The girl is still dead, and despite her sacrifice, and because of Dietz’s, Germany now falls.

  All I can do now is hide here, in the sheltering valleys of endless trees. Perhaps the Lorelei will call to me, at last. Until then, I kneel, and pray.

  “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry, for having offended thee…”

  — | — | —

  MUTILATION STREET

  Here we are.

  Be patient. Wait a moment, and it will all become clear to you.

  It’s 6:30 p.m. and the golden glow of kitchen lights are clicking off one by one as the men are slipping home after long days at the stockyards and the insurance companies and the morgues. Those long days at work are heaven compared to the long nights at home.

  The sweet perfume of burning flesh slinks in a fog through the heavy summer air, accompanied by the clatter of pots and the ringing tinkle of crashing glass. The casual walker might traverse this street thinking he heard and smelled the echoes of dinner in the wind.

  Of course, any casual walker here would likely never taste dinner again.

  On the west side of the street, a washing machine repairman staggers drunkenly forward, tool kit dipping dangerously close to the earth with each step. As he teeters onto the roadway, a Dodge Neon revs around the corner and clips him on the hip with its ever-smiling headlights (“Hi,” it seems to say). He cries out, just a despairing bark, really, and spins like a top on the curb before moving on once again, this time back in the direction he’d just left.

  He nears the bend at Mrs. Jacob’s house and trips on the folded slabs of topsy turvy sidewalk there. The gnarled elm has dredged the concrete up from the earth in its own scrabbling attempt to remain upright—or perhaps it moves the walkway to escape the rotting bodies festering beneath its trunk. But despite the desperate nails of its roots against the cement, its upper limbs remain bent low, and scrape painfully on the ground. Deep in the night, you can hear it clearly behind any of the windows facing the street…screeeach, scraaatch, screeeach, scraaatch.

  In the alley, there’s a cat with three legs that sometimes answers the cries of the tree. If there weren’t so many grey spots on the animal, you’d call it a black cat. As it stands, the cigarette burns give it more of a salt and pepper look as it shambles with its own lamed gait towards the crooked entrydoor cut into the Jone’s back door. The tiny door hits the feline where its tail would be, if it had one, as the poor animal drags itself through.

  The cat’s name is Stupid Bitch.

  At least, that’s what it answers to most often.

  Back on the street, the repairman reaches the end of the block once more, and begins to cross the intersection. Again, the cheerful Neon comes roaring around the corner to bash him in the thigh (two points). After moaning for a few moments on the asphalt, the man staggers back to the relative safety of the sidewalk, and half-walks, half-falls toward Mrs. Jacob’s twisted elm. His grey uniform is discolored in a startling number of places, smudges of grease and road tar here and there, but mostly wide swatches of blood, much of it already dry. There’s a long strip of scalp hanging from the back of his head like a grisly ponytail, but he doesn’t seem to notice it, despite the ever-lengthening map of gore down his back.

  He has been trying to leave this block since early afternoon. Makes you wonder what kind of mischief a roving repairman could have gotten into with his sack of tools to have ended up stuck here, doesn’t it? I’ll give you a clue; I happen to know that his repairman’s kit used to include a rusty blade and some other nasty looking looped tools that he’d stolen from an illegal abortionist.

  Just a word of caution: there are no knives allowed on Mutilation Street.

  Knives are against the law. The use of blades in mutilation is too easy. And generally makes things end too quickly.

  There is joy in repetition. Dull, painful repetition.

  And usually slow death.

  And then it all begins again.

  Shall I show you more?

  Here’s Mrs. [Not Her Real Name] Cleaver’s house. Mind the entrails. They may look like sausage but the smell never washes off your shoes.

  Every night she finds a new way to rip those grue-ish links from the hairy, obese belly of her husband. It’s a fixation she has. The best part is, when she gets really wicked, she stuffs chunks of his bloody colon into the fridge after he’s passed out and then fries them up for him to eat with his eggs in the morning.

  Talk about a breakfast that sticks to your ribs.

  What makes it all really tricky is that she only has two stumps to work with.

  That was his handiwork.

  Yes, he used a cleaver, but it was before they came to Mutilation Street. It was, in fact, what caused them to move here. She didn’t die, but she must have lost 10 pounds just from bleeding. They eventually just painted the hardwood floors in the room of the house where they found her, because the stain wouldn’t come out, no matter how deep the sandpaper ground.

  Tonight she’s been especially clever. She met him at the door wearing her most provocative negligee—a red silk number that barely covered her chest and left nearly everything else open to the air.

  Too little left to the imagination, if you ask me.

  When he grinned and dropped his lunchpail in order to kiss the rounded nub that once ended in a hand, she kneed him in the groin and then pounded his chin and balding scalp with the other arm, the one she’d had half-hidden behind her back, the one that had a steel rod strapped around the knotted mound of flesh at its end.

  It echoed through the room when the metal met the bone of his skull.

  Once he was out, she dragged him into the weight room in the back of the house, pinned his arms, neck and legs to the floor with a couple heavy barbells and, when he woke choking for air, she sealed his trap with the negligee. Fit the whol
e thing in his mouth, not that there was that much to it.

  Red or not, she decided she didn’t want to get blood on it.

  Spit washes out.

  Then she sat down on his face and began to gut him.

  With her feet.

  Using the broken edge of one of his empty beer bottles.

  You’d be amazed at the sensations of having your belly clumsily sawed open with glass while your mouth was filled with your wife’s panties and then sealed from calling out for help with the tender skin they usually protected. The blood doesn’t really spurt into the air, like you’d think it would, but it does stream steadily to pool on the floor. It also brings with it some yellow nuggets of fat and the occasional stream of blue-black, foul-smelling refuse nicked from the inside of the intestines.

  I’m sure he tried to bite, but with all that lace between his teeth, she probably felt nothing more than a tickle.

  The great thing for Mr. Cleaver [Not His Real Name] is that she finds a new way to disembowel him every night.

  Variety is the spice of death.

  In the rambling colonial on the corner of Mutilation and Divine live the Angels. They seem to feel themselves above the law and often take into each other using razor blades. Of course, these are not strictly against the code, not being “knives” per se, but nobody else on the block has ever dared cut into each other with one. Nobody wants to find out what punishment could be worse than life and death on Mutilation Street.

  The Angels moved in about six months ago. Word is, before they came to the neighborhood, she screamed at him for taking the Lord’s name in vain and so he stabbed her in the eye with a crucifix and then drove a chalice up her—well—you can guess. Turned her loving cup into a holy cup, you might say.

  I don’t know what she looks like beneath her robes, but she’s definitely missing an eye. It’s really quite unnerving to try to have a conversation with her and not stare at the scarred pit in her face that should hold a blue and white orb.

  Makes her always look off balance, too.

  Nowadays, when he gets home from mass, she’s usually waiting with a boiling pot of blessed wax. Some men are greeted with a martini and their slippers, he gets a mug of hot candle oil. Can’t argue with her methods; it’s hard for a man to swear with a cup or two of that melting down his throat.

  I hear they’ve barred her from worshipping at Resurrection Church given her propensity for leaving the building with vigil candles tucked into her blouse, but she still manages to get in now and then to steal a handful or two of holy candles.

  I think one of my favorite stories from the street was of the time he got home late from midnight mass and she just knew he’d been fooling around with one of the altar sluts.

  He walked in the door at 3 a.m. and she was waiting, armed with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a heavy wooden rosary.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  “I was at mass, sweetheart,” he insisted, putting his palms together as if praying.

  “And did they use Obsession as incense tonight?” she replied, ever so sweetly.

  His eyebrows wrinkled at that one, and as he stammered for something to say, she reached into his coat pocket and spilled an array of gum wrappers, change and condoms to the floor.

  “Did the priest hand those out for communion?” she smiled, pointing at the rubbers.

  “I was only worshipping the goodness that He created,” he flailed, which was really the wrong answer.

  Take a note here. Don’t try to link adultery with godliness. The holy types never buy it.

  She didn’t either.

  Instead she smashed the Virgin Mary across his temple, dropping him like a kneeler.

  She hung the rosary around his throat as a necklace, and then attached its cross to the ornate golden rope drapery drawstring. It didn’t take as much strength using the drape pulleys to hoist him into the air. By the time he came to from the statue-bashing, his face was already blue.

  Bet he wished then that he hadn’t found the studs when he installed that drape rod.

  He didn’t last long that night, but from what I hear, he was awake long enough to see her using his straight razor to slice off his most unholy of organs and then, on a cutting board right in front of him, she trimmed it into thin, waferlike slices.

  She put a couple dozen of these unholy hosts in the oven and served them with a cup of his blood the next day to the neighborhood wives.

  Apparently she thought if he was going to give himself to one woman on the block, he ought to give a taste to everyone.

  Mrs. MacLean, over on 135 Mutilation, has a real classical cruel streak to her. She’s also a firm believer in repetition, sans spice.

  Her husband comes home every night at 6:30 from his graveyard shift (not the night shift, he really digs all day in the graveyard.) He changes from his muddy clothes into jeans and a T-shirt and comes to the kitchen table, ready for dinner. Mrs. MacLean is a knock-out; long blond hair sets off piercing blue eyes, tight waist accentuates nicely rounded hips and she’s got cleavage to drown in. Every night she shows it off for him, proud of regaining her figure so soon after birthing their first child.

  It’s always hot here, so she wears hot pink crop-tops and denim short-shorts a lot. The neighborhood boys are always gawking during the day when she lays out on their deck. She is literally tan all over, and loves the attention. But at night, she has different reasons for attracting the attention of her mate.

  “Was she good for you?” she asks him, as she finishes up preparing dinner in the kitchen, always reminding her husband of his infidelity during her pregnancy.

  “Were her tits nicer than mine? More firm? Was she a gymnast for you?”

  She sets the table with a pot of steaming green beans and a wooden bowl of salad, garnished with cucumbers and croutons and little pink fingers and toes.

  “Was she worth it?” she asks as she sets his plate in front of him.

  It’s the same every night.

  “I hope he’s not too done,” she says, as he stares down at the blackened carcass of his firstborn son, steam rising visibly from wide slices through its neck and chest, mouth open to a baby scream, a tiny well-baked tongue lolling grey between shriveled lips.

  He puts his face in his hands and cries.

  “Was she worth it?” Mrs. MacLean asks again.

  Oh, you were worried about Stupid Bitch, the three-legged cat? Don’t be, really. The Jones’ cat is one of the street’s most beloved pets. Everyone in the neighborhood takes time from their own vengeful projects to help it out.

  Sometimes they strap a box of rat poison around its neck. Others give it hunks of maggot-ridden meat. Still others send gifts from the sewer, or the laundry tub.

  The cat takes them all home. Through the alley, up the rotting wood stairs and through its private door, into the living room where the Jones’ lie.

  They were paralyzed when they came here, some kind of accident with the stairs when the mister was chasing the cat. Amazing that they could both break their backs like that, chasing a cat that only had three legs. Justice, I suppose, for what they did to the cat. I heard that it was affectionate, even though they both put out their cigarettes on its back.

  The story goes, one night when it insisted on purring and snuggling into Mr. Jones’ lap, he yelled “Stupid Bitch!” grabbed it in a fit of rage, twisting its back leg until it gave in an audible snap. His wife screamed at him that now they were going to have to pay a vet bill and have the dumb cat hobbling around in a cast for who knows how long. He shrugged, said “Not necessarily,” and gripping the cat by its hindquarters and dangling paw, gave a great yank, ripping the broken leg right off the poor pet.

  The neighbors heard that animal’s yowl three houses away.

  They did have a vet bill, but the cat didn’t need a cast.

  Anyway, since they moved to the street, that cat finds something disgusting to bring home every night for their supper. The Jones’ are just ly
ing there on the floor inside, and the cat drops stuff right in their mouths. If the neighbors aren’t helpful, it brings home stuff from the back alley—dead rats, bugs, toads, poison… they have some pretty painful cramps ‘most every night, I expect.

  I think the cat’s best one came with the help of Mrs. Alfred, down the block a bit. She has a thing for fire—served her husband his own leg as a pot roast one night, after strapping him down on the floor and holding his leg in the roaring flames of their fireplace for 20 or 30 minutes.

  Not sure how much appetite he had left at that point.

  But she really put some thought into helping out Stupid Bitch—made that cat a little bucket with reinforced tin foil and some shoelaces. That cat carried and dragged its hot burden all the way down the alley, and into its house. Then he tipped the contents into Mr. and Mrs. Jones’ mouths, one hunk a piece.

  Must have burnt like hell.

  Mrs. Alfred gave the cat a couple of white hot coals from her grill.

  Nobody likes people who used to put cigarettes out on their pets.

  Here we are at last.

  Corner of Mutilation and Hunger Ave. This is it. Says so here on your deed.

  182 Mutilation St.

  This house probably needs some work—it’s been empty for a long time, which is odd, because once people move into this neighborhood, they almost never leave.

  Not a lot of people find their way to this block, though. Makes you wonder how people can possibly end up here. ’Course, hang around the street long enough, and you get to know everyone’s grisly stories.