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
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
A Circus in Five Acts
You Never Got Used to the Needle
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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.