Free Needles & Sins by John Everson Page A

There’s still hope.”
    I didn’t want to say it. But I couldn’t help myself. “There is no hope,” I said. “There is no other place.”
“But what about God, the angels…”
    “Lies,” I said. “Feel-good fantasies. You’ll hear rumors even here. People like to talk about a light that opens up sometimes, and souls slip into its spotlight like moths to a porch light. But it’s just talk. This is where the strong souls come, after the body dies. This is the abode of the stubborn, the willful, the greedy and the needy. This is where people who will not go quietly, end up. This isn’t hell,” I said. “This is forever.”
    “If there is no God,” she said, “than why is there a church?”
    “I told you, this is the place for the thick-headed and hard-willed. Some still believe in a higher power. But come around here, I have more to show you.”
    We walked around the flower gardens of beautiful tropical flowers and bougainvillea and as we stode past, the leaves of mimosa plants closed behind us, as if they were rolling up the welcome carpet. A thousand shades and scents lined the walk up to the glowing golden wood doors of the most beautiful church in creation. A fairytale castle sprung to form in the afterlife in honor of something that never existed. Dreams inside of lies inside of illusions.
    As we approached the far side, I felt her body stiffen.
    The walls of the church on its far side had given way, or been blown away. Instead of granite and stained glass, there was a ragged hole through most of the long wall. It was ringed in soot, as if a great fire had destroyed half the church, yet somehow left the other half completely untouched. What she gasped at was not the destruction of the architectural miracle, but rather, the line of gallows and nooses that hung from every peak where a stained glass window had once been mounted. There were 13 in all, and from 13 thick rope nooses hung 13 skinned and bloody corpses, faces twisted in a communal rictus of anguish and insane pain. Every now and then, they would twitch and swat with swollen, ropy arms at the flies that buzzed with a vacuum cleaner drone through the air, biting and sucking at the flesh, fresher than fresh. The hanged men were still alive; or rather, animatedly dead. The flies ate their skin off as soon as it could regrow itself, an endless cycle of rebirth and death.
    “Oh god,” she cried.
    “For every good, there’s a bad, for every love, a hate,” I recounted. “We live on the razor’s edge of balance. This is heaven and hell, together in a yin-yang ouroboros. There is no pleasure without equal and opposite pain here. No beauty without horrible ugliness. No angel without devil.”
    I wrapped my arm around her again and pulled her from the scene. A scream, horrible and ululating, rang out behind.
    “I don’t believe you,” she said, but the emptiness in her voice said otherwise.
     
    ««—»»
     
    I was falling in love. Still, I had never asked her name. It was better that way, a means of keeping distance. But now, distance was receding. I found her again and again by the Wall of Life, crying about Jonas, her son who had molested his own child, and April, her daughter who was snorting enough white powder that it was only a matter of weeks—or even days—before she joined us. Still, she insisted on following their lives and seeing all of the bitter mistakes and hidden sins that a mother should never be allowed to witness in her children. She cried blood every morning, and I sweated it as I walked her home.
    I was well-established here, and she only fumbling her way. I rented her a small room on the corner of Efluvium and Serenity, and I held a key. I used it now to let her in, and then closed the insanity out behind us. The place was clean; I had quickly instructed her on the proper ways of avoiding a corruption episode when I saw a counter full of bananas and oranges on my first visit.
    Now the counters were clean, and the