Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  “So you’re a fortune teller, huh?”

  “I’m Skyy, and I will tell you your future,” she said, warming up to her usual spiel.

  “Whatever,” he said, stopping her cold. “Just don’t lie to me, okay?”

  “The future doesn’t lie,” she said. “It just is.”

  “Well, if it’s like the present, it probably sucks,” he said. “But lay it on me. I wanna know.”

  “Come now,” she crooned, her triple gaze tracing the beautiful lines of the art on his arm, and lingering on the shadowed wells of his deep brown eyes. “Could it really be that bad?”

  “You tell me,” he said, and offered her his palms. She accepted them into hers, and with a purple painted nail, traced the long seven of his right hand, and then the tributaries and creases extending from it towards his thumb. This didn’t tell her anything, but it was one of the expected tricks of the trade.

  Skyy really did tell fortunes. It was a gift of the third eye, or a fluke of nature. But what she needed to catch the scattered glimpses of a person’s future wasn’t the slant and flail of their wrinkles, it was the touch of their aura. And this she gained from holding Talman’s hands.

  As one finger traced the soft lines in his palm, behind her eyes a vision built, and then broke, plunging her consciousness into another place. Her eyes unconsciously shut as she absorbed the waking dream, and suddenly she was Talman, lying in a darkened room, face buried in pillow, fists clenched and pounding uselessly on a mattress, as a machine gun swift hail of piercing, painful slugs sliced into his back.

  “I’m through with talking,” a heavy, slurred voice said, and then another red-hot pain sliced through her vision. Something warm and wet was dripping down her ribs, and without warning, she suddenly felt nothing at all below her neck, though she could feel her body rocking with the blows.

  “Fuck you,” she heard herself say, and then something sharp and pointed hit the back of her head and she kissed the pillow, suddenly not feeling able to speak or move or…live. The world was a mass of black and red spiders, skittering and weaving a criss-cross pattern of pain around her until the strength ebbed, and she felt her very self slipping down a dark rabbit hole, a well of existence, and the life above became a light that glowed bright and then ebbed as she fell farther and farther…

  Skyy snapped back to reality and opened all three eyes to stare without mercy at Talman, whose hands remained clasped in her own.

  “You will die,” she said, and this time she wasn’t mistakenly channeling the future of her mother. She was serious.

  “No shit,” the boy said, unflinching. “The question is, ‘when.’ Everyone will die. That’s not much of a fortune.”

  Skyy met his eyes with a trace of fear. She’d only seen the moment of someone’s death a handful of times in her life, and her mother’s imminent demise was one of them. She’d never seen the death of someone so young. And from the glimpses she’d seen of Talman’s body in the seconds she’d “been” him, his murder was not far in the future.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, searching for the way out of her admission. Telling the tale of someone’s death was not good form for a circus fortune teller. It didn’t exactly increase business.

  “You’re right. Everybody dies eventually, and you don’t need to know the method of yours. Let’s try a different reading.”

  She reached out to touch his forehead, but instead he grabbed her palm and pushed it against his own.

  “I don’t care,” he insisted. “Tell me exactly what you saw. Exactly.”

  Skyy looked down, avoiding his eyes.

  “Straight-up,” he urged, and tugged on her hand.

  “You were lying on a bed,” she whispered, “and someone was beating you from behind. With a knife I think. It really hurt. At the end…I think you died.”

  “Figured that sooner or later fists wouldn’t be enough,” Talman said, releasing her hand. “Thanks,” he nodded, lips drawn tight. “Thanks.”

  He rose to go and Skyy stood to stop him.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Let me try to see something else. The future is a changing path.”

  “If I go home, I’m dead,” he said. “That’s pretty clear. And when it comes to it, I didn’t really need a fortune teller to tell me.”

  Talman turned and walked without pausing through the opening in her tent, and Skyy slumped back to her chair and cried.

  “Reind,” she called out after a minute, and the blonde tightrope-walker’s head popped inside the flap.

  “Don’t let anyone else in for a few, okay?”

  His face clouded, but he nodded and stepped back outside.

  She put her face in her hands and cried on the table, her eyes still seeing the shadowed fabric of the pillows, her chest feeling the pressure of the threads of the sheets as someone behind her sunk piercing blade after blade into her back and neck and legs…

  Talman walked away from the fortune teller’s tent with speed. He had no destination, but he didn’t need to be reminded that going home meant eventually dying under the misguided wrath of his stepfather. He passed the games of chance (read, rip-off) and then the Big Top, where he could hear the echo of the barker’s microphone, and the bleating trumpet of an elephant.

  At last he came to the Freak Show tent. Outside, the entrance was empty, and a sign hung from a lone post that said “Closed, please come back in an hour.”

  “Fuck that,” Talman said, and, looking around to see that no one was watching him (they weren’t), he stepped up to the tent and found the opening. With a nod and a step, he was inside.

  The tent was dark, but it wasn’t hard to tell what the rows of jars just beyond the ticket-taker’s podium were.

  “Shit,” Talman pronounced, and stepped closer to see the contents of the seemingly endless rows of jars. There were five rows, stacked in front of a gold curtain. They lined the passage that led inside to a main stage where freak show performers did their thing. But the first thing you saw upon filing into the tent was the jars. Inside each one floated a small body—or in some cases, two small bodies, which happened to share a common organ—like a chest or a groin. There were babies with six eyes ranged across their skulls, and unborn abortions of six and eight limbs, or two heads, or three legs. Talman stared at the array in disbelief, and peered closely into the yellowed water to see if he could tell whether the bodies were plastic, or if they were real bodies that some fucked up death artist had taken and sewn together in warped and wicked ways. It was dark, but he swore he could see the intricate whorls of fingerprints on the seven fingers of one larger body. Its eyes were like black pools of tar, and Talman drew back suddenly, the hair prickling on the back of his neck. He felt as if he was being watched, as if all the dozens of dead things were silently turning and twisting in their transparent crypts to stare at him.

  He backed away from the wall of babies and moved into the main area of the tent, where empty metal folding chairs waited in lines for an audience and a performer to take the empty stage.

  “I thought that was you,” a voice said from behind him.

  Talman whirled to face the newcomer, a tall, heavyset man with thick lips, a wide nose and hairy arms. A man Talman knew well. Terry. The scars on his back burned at the sound of his voice.

  “Yeah, so what?” Talman said.

  His stepfather moved closer, his steps menacing.

  “You’re supposed to be at work,” he said.

  “You’re supposed to be finding a job,” Talman retorted.

  The blow landed before the boy could lift his foot to move, and he fell backwards, the explosion in his head quickly whited out by the spears of pain from the backs and legs and seats of chairs meeting his body between ribs, behind his knee, cracking against his neck. He’d barely touched the ground when his stepfather was lifting him by the front of his shirt and slapping him across the face again.

  “Don’t fuckin’ give me mouth, punk. You want to go a round, we’ll do it. And yo
u’ll lose.”

  Talman didn’t say a thing, still trying to focus past the stars in front of his eyes.

  “We’re gonna go home now, I think. And maybe you and I will have a little more discussion once we get to your room.”

  Talman remembered the vision of Skyy, and wondered if today was the day. Certainly Terry looked mean enough to do some major damage if they were truly left alone. Fear chilled his belly and Talman knew that he couldn’t go home. Didn’t dare.

  “Little fuckin’ prick,” Terry was going on. “I shoulda fed it to you a long time ago and gotten you into line when you were younger. Now it’s only gonna hurt more.”

  Talman knew what that meant, and his back and legs throbbed with the memories. No, he decided. He wasn’t going. Not this time. With a sudden lunge, he brought his knee up to slam into Terry’s crotch and then ripped away from the bigger man as his fingers relaxed for a moment and he screamed in anger and pain.

  Talman ran for the exit, but just as he rounded the bend to the hallway of fetal jars, a blow struck him in the back and he went down, tasting dirt and grass.

  “Now you’re gonna really get it,” Terry growled, pulling him off the ground by his hair. Talman saw the murder in those steely blue eyes and screamed for help.

  “Shut it,” Terry yelled, clamping one hand over Talman’s mouth, and then doubling over just a little and gritting his teeth. The knee had done a good job.

  Talman thought frantically about how to extricate himself from the man. Today was the day for sure if he ended up on his bed back home. He wasn’t strong enough to punch his way out of this, and Terry was guarding his crotch with his left hand. Talman looked into the black eyes of the dead baby with seven fingers. It seemed to speak to him. A quiet urgent voice in his head told him exactly what to do. And he did.

  The crack of the glass against Terry’s temple caught his stepfather by surprise, dropping him instantly to the earth as a stinking rain of yellow liquid and glass covered his chest and shoulder. As he rolled over on the ground, Terry’s face mashed into the soft, buttery skin of the dead child, ripping a tissue-thin veil of flesh from the baby and bending its arm backwards with an almost inaudible snap. A darker but still almost clear fluid trickled from the pale insides of the baby to drool on Terry’s lips, but he didn’t flinch. The man was out cold.

  Talman dropped the lid and the glass mouth still connected in shards to it, and started for the tent flap leading outside. But then at the last minute he turned. If Terry came to in the next couple minutes, the first place he would look would be outside in the sun, where Talman would be easy to spot. He needed to hide.

  Stepping over his stepfather and the broken baby, Talman ran through the exhibition area and across the stage. In the back he found a passage leading away from the crowds and the entrance, and he took it, stopping just before rounding a bend where he heard voices.

  Cautiously he peeked around the canvas and saw a dark-haired man in a red suit with a long mustache pacing outside of a trailer. Two dwarves chattered nearby. He waited, wondering if he was trapped now. He couldn’t go back; he didn’t think Terry would stay out for long. But he was too exposed to stay here. What could he do? He looked around but saw no place to secret himself, until the area cleared. Then he could hide behind the trailer if he wanted. Or duck out the back of the tent and continue across the grounds. But he was probably safer hidden in a back tent for a couple hours than wandering around in the open.

  The door of the trailer opened, and Talman saw a pretty girl poke her head out and call to the three waiting.

  “Get Skyy,” she said.

  The door closed and both the man and the dwarves hurried out of the tent through a flap a few yards away. They were heading back out towards the Midway. As soon as they were gone, Talman ran to the back of the trailer, and sat against its walls, arms hugging his legs close to his body. How long could he stay here?

  “She wants you,” the barker said, and a chill spiked through Skyy’s belly. The time was here. Taking a deep breath and blinking back a tear, she hurried after him and Wen and Wong to her mother’s trailer.

  Inside, Reind stood against one wall as Erin mopped Yvette’s brow with a rag. The others were there too, Felina, Yvonne, Andrese, Helena. Nobody said a word as she entered, and she went straight to the head of the bed. Erin stepped away and Skyy knelt in her place, immediately feeling the awful pain of her mother through the strange sight of her third eye. All pain was bad, but this pain felt truly…wrong. Terminal.

  “Mama,” she whispered. The older woman smiled weakly and nodded.

  There was a thud from the far corner of the trailer and Andrese turned his blonde head to look out the back window.

  “Someone’s outside,” he announced. His brunette side never stopped staring at Yvette.

  “Who?” Skyy asked.

  “Kid. Big hair and tattoos. He’s leaning against the wall over here.”

  “I’ll shag him,” Reind said, and moved to the door.

  Skyy watched him leave, but then called him back just as the door was closing.

  “Reind,” she said. “Don’t send him away. Bring him in here.”

  “You can’t be serious!” he said. “She’s dying, you can’t…”

  “Trust me,” Skyy said. It felt right.

  The door closed and she looked at her mother’s white face. Despite the shaking, wracking pain, Yvette’s eyes met hers with a strange calmness, searching her daughter’s soul.

  “I’m not ready,” Skyy whispered.

  Yvette met her gaze and hissed. “Ready,” she said. “You must. You’ll find help.”

  The trailer door opened, and Reind pushed a struggling Talman into the room.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” the boy protested.

  “Shhhh,” Skyy said, looking his way. Talman was instantly silent.

  Talman saw the room was filled with freaks. A two-headed guy. A girl with too many arms. Dwarves. Skyy and her three eyes. But the strangest, he thought, was on the bed, where a half naked woman lay gasping and shaking with an exposed and ridiculous number of breasts. He suddenly knew why the Freak Show tent had been empty in the middle of the day. They were all here.

  “Is she having a baby?” he asked, noting the bulge of her belly and the cribs and jars.

  “Several,” the girl with four arms answered.

  At that, the woman on the bed suddenly cried out loud, a hideous, toe-curling scream that seemed to cut off as quickly as it began. She rose from the pillow, and then fell back to the bed, and Talman saw the woman at the foot of the bed reach forward, and rescue a red, wriggling thing from between the woman’s legs.

  “It’s a boy,” Erin said and handed the child to Andrese who immediately began wiping it clean.

  “It has three heads!” Andrese announced. “And it’s still living!”

  And then Yvette screeched again, and another bloody bundle fell into Erin’s hands. This one made no noise. Erin shook her head and handed the stillborn child to one of the dwarves.

  “Too many testicles,” Wen said, and sponged the baby off before placing it in a jar to be worked on later.

  Again Yvette cried out with heartstopping volume, and then instantly stopped as deformed child after deformed child was delivered, eight in all.

  Talman watched it all silently, keeping to the wall and out of the way as each of the family took a child, dead or alive and cleaned it, readying it for life…or display. A girlchild had eight nipples, just like its mother. A boy had a tail growing from the end of its spine.

  The one that chilled him the most though was the child without any sex at all. It was a stillborn, and was smooth between its legs. In the center of its chest was a second mouth. Both of its mouths were wide open, and Talman imagined it inside Yvette, soundlessly screaming in stereo as it expired.

  At last, with a final expulsion of dark blood and what Talman guessed were the slick organs of “afterbirth,” Yvette slumped to the bed, and cried no more.<
br />
  “Benjamin,” Skyy suddenly called, and the door burst open instantly. The ringmaster entered, and rushed to Yvette’s side.

  “I think it’s over,” Skyy whispered, and drew back as the man buried his mustache in the crook of Yvette’s neck. The woman didn’t stir.

  Skyy came to stand by Talman, cheeks glistening with the waterfall of tears from three crying eyes. After watching Benjamin cry and whisper to Yvette’s body for a few minutes, Skyy finally turned to look at Talman with a long, wet stare.

  Finally, she nodded to herself and asked, “You don’t want to go home, do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Would you like to travel with us for awhile?”

  The faces of her sisters and brothers nearby turned towards her with frowns and one of Andrese’s mouths whispered, “What do we need him for?”

  Skyy smiled. “He needs us right now.”

  Talman stood up straighter, about to protest. He didn’t need anyone.

  “And I need him,” she continued. “If mama’s passing things on to me, I need help, and you all already have work enough. And I don’t think Benjamin is going to be up to it for awhile.”

  The ringmaster was now sobbing uncontrollably at the bedside.

  Talman relaxed slightly.

  “It’s been awhile since the circus had a tattooed man,” Skyy said thoughtfully, looking again at Talman’s garishly decorated arms. “Interested in adding to your collection?”

  Talman grinned, just a little.

  “Yeah,” he said, and moved with Skyy to stand at the side of Yvette’s bed. He looked around the room at this bizarre family of freaks and felt something strange inside. Something he hadn’t felt since his dad passed away.

  Talman finally felt at home.

  “Yeah,” he whispered again, this time to himself. In his throat he felt a lump of sorrow for the pain of his newfound family, and after a moment, a tear crossed his cheek, for the mother he would never get to know.