Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

Can you say Relief?

The dome tilted violently and tiny loose objects rolled across the floor. Jesus appeared not to notice as he operated the remote, making adjustments to Gojiro’s forward direction with the rapt concentration of a twelve-year-old playing an advanced video game. The couch had now become his command chair, and he was totally locked into the task of guiding the huge creature to Necropolis. The dome lurched again and Semple grabbed for a handhold. Mr. Thomas simply braced his legs. He seemed quite adept at rolling with the motion, although Semple suspected that it was easier to handle the jolting effect of the giant reptile’s walk when you had four legs instead of just two. And, of course, on the lifeside, Dylan Thomas had been a highly adept drunk. Hadn’t he walked from the White Horse Tavern to the Chelsea Hotel with hardly a liver on the night that he died?

Jesus had surprised Semple by taking quite readily to the suggestion that he power up Gojiro to destroy Necropolis. After some initial blinking incomprehension, a brief tantrum, and then a quick dip in the cross-shaped pool, he had adopted her plan with comparative alacrity. He seemed relieved to have someone else to suggest a course of action. He had certainly exhibited no moral qualms about setting the monster in motion with the deliberate goal of eating an entire city. In fact, the only objections had come from the goat. “You’re supposed to be the Prince of Peace, boyo. Or had you forgotten that?”

Jesus had brushed the reminder aside. “I’ve been meaning to drive that fucking Anubis out of the temple for a long time.”

Semple didn’t want any geographical confusion. “Actually, he doesn’t have a temple, just a huge overbearing palace.”

“Same difference. I come not bearing garlands but with a sword.”

Mr. Thomas had snorted. “That’s not even the correct biblical quotation.”

Jesus had glared at him. “Those fucking gospel writers never got my shit right. They screwed up all the best bits.”

The goat gave him a look of cool disbelief as it coped with the next sway of the floor and Jesus went back to his remote. “I seem to have forgotten how to stop the dome from rolling each time he takes a step.”

“Go into DOS and try Esc-control-alt-F12.”

Jesus keyed the suggested sequence and immediately the swaying was reduced from the wild tilting of a yacht in a cyclone to little more than a rhythmic ripple. Jesus grinned at Mr. Thomas. “You remembered.”

“So would you if you hadn’t taken up residence on Gilligan’s Island.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

It had taken Jesus a few minutes to recover from the soporific effect of TV grip. He had keyed the wrong commands, and, as far as Semple could read the repercussions in the dome, he more than once set Gojiro reeling and staggering like a drunken mountain. In short order, however, helped by his own recovering faculties and a series of scathing reprimands from Mr. Thomas, Jesus regained his grip and put the great beast on line for travel and ultimate assault. Even the dome itself was altered by the process. The TV screen that Jesus had previously watched with such obsessive languor enlarged to a 180-degree wraparound format that appeared to offer all of the monster’s forward vision plus considerable peripherals. When it was first up, the image was shaky and unstable, subject to snow, flare-out, and solarization. It needed a couple of passes at the remote before he managed to bring it under control and activate a kind of Stedicam effect, which eventually got him, Semple, and Mr. Thomas a panoramic view of the swiftly passing desert as Gojiro jogged toward his target at a speed in excess of one hundred miles an hour.

Semple may have made the first crucial intervention when she’d taken the remote from Jesus and cut the electronic umbilical, but once the King of the Monsters was set on his lumbering way to Necropolis, Semple was relegated to little more than a spectator’s role. The scene inside the dome was, to say the least, a strange one. Mr. Thomas stood foursquare in front of the screen, acting as forward spotter. Jesus sat in the center of the couch, the large remote on one knee, also staring at the screen like the commander on his bridge. Semple, in her scanty red superheroine costume and platform shoes, stood behind the couch that had now become Jesus’ command chair. Fortunately, Jesus was no longer naked. He had at least bothered to slip on Nike sneakers, a purple linen toga, and a totally unnecessary pair of Erwin Rommel goggles, pushed back on his forehead, before he put Gojiro into operational mode. To Semple’s mind, they were a highly unlikely trio to be in apparent charge of a massive reptile primed and looking for a fight.

“Do you have to steer him?”

Jesus shook his head. “No, he smells enriched uranium. He’ll go straight for it. Radiation is, quite literally, in the Big Green’s blood.”

Jesus was leaning back on the couch in a woodenly confident pose of overstated authority that he could have learned only from William Shatner. Trying to look every inch the commander of the massive instrument of destruction that Gojiro had now become, he was now the absolute diametric contrast to the prone and priapic figure that he’d been such a short time before.

“How long will it be before we see Necropolis?”

Jesus gave a half shrug, as though it hardly mattered. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Certainly no more.”

Semple wondered how Jesus might react if she introduced him to her second idea over the course of the short journey to the target. He certainly seemed to be in a new mood for adventure; maybe it would be okay to deliver the second hit of the one-two combination.

“I have a sibling.”

Jesus nodded, keeping his new, hawklike Starfleet concentration on the forward screen. “That’s very interesting.”

“She has a need to make the acquaintance of someone like you.”

“It’s said the whole of humanity needs to make my acquaintance.”

Semple ignored this messianic ego flourish and began to describe Aimee, her Heaven, and her predicament in terms that were glowing if not necessarily accurate, using every chance at her disposal to stroke and flatter. She must have made some impression, for at the end of her recital he actually looked in her direction. “You’re saying that she needs a man to run her Heaven for her?”

“You could be her savior.”

The goat rolled his eyes; Semple was overdoing it. Jesus, on the other hand, basked in the appeal of the idea. It seemed that, where his supposed messianic qualities were concerned, flattery could get one just about anywhere. He stroked his beard and smiled. “And which of you would I be expected to have sex with? You or your sibling?”

Semple decided she didn’t like this Captain Kirk version of Jesus any better than the comatose masturbator, but he might be exactly what she needed to inflict on Aimee. He could well turn her sister’s Heaven into a living Hell. She quickly played along with the gag, although she was starting to suspect, if only on instinct, that Jesus was probably impotent where women were concerned. “Perhaps the two of us will have to fight over you.”

This must have really caught his imagination, because he looked around sharply. “That could be the most interesting part.”

Semple kept her fixed smile, but now she knew for sure; this was the one she wanted to dispatch to Aimee. Jesus, though, was having second thoughts. “I don’t know if I should travel from here. The Big Green might need me.”

This stopped even Semple’s fixed smile in its tracks. “Need you? Why should he need you? You don’t do anything but watch TV inside a tumor.”

Jesus turned on the couch and looked at her with a nastiness she hadn’t previously observed. “Well, it sure as shit beats dragging a cross through the streets of Jerusalem, doesn’t it? How would you like to get crowned with thorns, scourged, and crucified? You want to spend your time schlepping up loaves and fishes for thousands of the great unwashed, start doing miracles at parties when the booze runs out, and have to ride around the desert on a recalcitrant stinking donkey? Or maybe you’d rather have me go through that shit all over again? Are you one of those miserable traditionalists?”

Semple had no diplomatic answer to any of this, and Jesus might have railed on much longer had not something on the forward screen caught his attention. The air on the horizon had become a smudge of dirt and pollution. “We’ll have to discuss this later. That’s Necropolis up ahead.”

***

Jim was strung out, a million molecules stretching to near-infinity, playing host to a traffic of vibrations that manifested itself in the form of screaming, unimaginable, and totally unendurable pain. Pain defined his entire being. The receptors in his brain howled and hurt for things they couldn’t have. An interlocking helix revolved around him at sickening speed, blazing with colors unconfined to the limitations of the visible spectrum. He felt like he was going through an even more hideous death than his last one, but he knew this wasn’t the comparatively ordered interface between life and death, this was something far more complicated and far more awful, and that Dr. Hypodermic was deliberately doing it to him. His only recourse was to wail in his agony and helplessness. “How much more do you want from me? I fucking died for you the last time, didn’t I?”

In response, a voice hissed in his ear, a voice with the faintest trace of a French Caribbean accent. “My petit ami, Sid Vicious told me you were running away from me.”

“I wasn’t running-”

“So what were you doing?”

“I just didn’t want to get involved again.”

The red eyes of Dr. Hypodermic glowed like twin sources of malignant energy in the deep black space beyond the interlocking helix. “Involved?”

The helices increased their dizzying speed. Nameless blind larvae of things too iniquitous to contemplate snuffled at Jim’s stretched and strung-out molecules and Jim groaned. “Just make this pain stop.”

The disembodied eyes were pitiless and the voice ignored his plea. “Jim Morrison doesn’t want to get involved?”

“I don’t even know that I’m really Jim Morrison.”

“You know exactly who you are, and besides, mon fils, would it really matter? You made the addict’s compact, whoever you might be. I never forget one of my own.”

Jim was suffering to the point where he’d agree to anything. “Okay, okay, I don’t deny it. I’m yours. I’m a fucking thrall. I belong to you. I’ll never try to get away again. Just make the pain stop.”

“Look on this as a negative reinforcement, a remembrance of anguish past.”

Jim wondered if abject pleading might do any good. “Please, in all mercy, make the pain stop.”

It didn’t. “Now you know what Hell used to be like when Lucifer was running the show.” Explosions of blazing orange-yellow lava rocketed through the helix spirals, creating trajectories of fire. Suddenly Jim’s agony grew exponentially worse, and Dr. Hypodermic chuckled. The sound was blood-chilling. “Where’s it written that death would separate us, mon brave?”

“There was nothing ever written.”

“Wasn’t the accord of addiction ratified in blood?”

“I told you already. I give up. I’m yours, anything you want. You don’t have to torture me to make your point. I’m not fucking resisting.”

“And I am not making a point, mon ami.”

“So what’s this all about? You already said it was a negative reinforcement. Is this Limbo?”

“Not Limbo, just a reprise of the pain before the gift of relief.”

And suddenly the pain was not only gone but hardly a memory. Jim free-floated fetal, curled naked, in the surrounding safety and warm liquid protection of a perfect womb, a dark star child whom no one could touch and only one could approach. The Caribbean hiss of the Doctor was his complete lullaby, the only one he needed or cared about. Hypodermic laughed again. “And now the gift of relief before the return of the pain.”

***

Mr. Thomas glanced back at Jesus. “Dirigible with fighter escort at eleven o’clock.”

The tallest towers of Necropolis were now visible on the horizon, as were one large black dot and three smaller ones in the air above the city. Jesus laughed. The prospect of the attack on Necropolis had raised his energy levels to a point where he was close to manic, and the messianic adrenaline seemed to be pumping double-time. “They always send up the air defenses first. It’s the standard opening move. Anubis is looking for a chess game.”

Semple was still standing slightly behind Jesus’ command chair. “Are those planes going to be a problem?”

Jesus grinned and shook his head. “The last time he went after Tokyo, they sent Fl 6s against him. All they managed to do was make him angrier.” He glanced at the goat. “What do you think those things are, Mr. Thomas?”

“One Zeppelin heavy gunship and three fighters. Two Fokkers and a Sopwith Camel, as far as I can tell. Either he’s confusing Godz with King Kong or he’s going for a World War 1 motif.”

Jesus grinned. “This is going to be a November turkey shoot.”

He hit the remote and to Semple’s surprise she found herself looking at a split-screen triptych. The center panel was the forward view as before, but on either side were two medium-shot side views of Gojiro moving across the desert. “How do you do that?”

“It’s the second and third unit.”

This piece of illogical tech was more than Semple cared to delve into, so she remained silent. If Gojiro traveled with his own movie crew, she really didn’t want to know the how or why. She was content to watch as he loped across the desert. As the three elderly planes homed in on him, the King of the Monsters made no attempt to attack or evade them. Either he or Jesus, whoever was really in control, held the same course, going straight for the city. The Zeppelin cruised at an altitude roughly equivalent to Gojiro’s eye level. Jesus noted this and nodded knowingly. “Whoever’s in command of the thing thinks he can come in head-on, make a half turn, and open up with a broadside. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s dealing with.”

“They’re very confident of themselves in Necropolis. Particularly the officer corps. I think it comes from a regular diet of roast baby.”

Mr. Thomas glanced at the two of them. “The commander could be a woman.”

Semple shook her head. “Not in Necropolis.”

The three fighters were adopting a different tactic. They were climbing, gaining height for a formation power-dive attack. Gojiro seemed to see the planes for the first time and slowed his pace. His giant brow furrowed and he stopped completely, letting out a slow, tentative growl.

“Ggggrrraaapph.”

The three fighters reached their operational ceiling and went into a slow turn.

Jesus’ eyes gleamed. “Here they come. They do think he’s bloody King Kong.”

The fighters dived, gathering speed as they dropped. Gojiro looked up; in the dome, the leading plane increasingly filled the forward screen section. Despite herself, Semple ducked and Jesus and Mr. Thomas exchanged smiles. The next moment, Gojiro took a deep breath and exhaled violently. The leading biplane was enveloped by his electric-blue, radioactive breath. The plane instantly burst into flames and spun out burning. The monster continued to breathe out, hosing down the other two fighters so they also burned and fell. Jesus let out a whoop.

“Yes!”

Semple’s eyes narrowed. To her mind, the way Jesus exulted in the thrill of the kill was a little close to unhealthy-something to note for future reference. The Zeppelin had now started to turn, though whether to bring its guns to bear or simply to get the hell out of there was unclear. This time, Gojiro chose not to use his radioactive breath. He charged forward, tail waving, and grabbed for the dirigible like a child reaching for a toy balloon. The airship managed to elude his reaching hands with a sudden and desperate surge of speed, but hardly had the maneuverability to do it a second time. The King of the Monsters grabbed and twisted the length of the fuselage very much like a man tearing apart a baguette of French bread. The aluminum skeleton that gave the airship its rigidity buckled and snapped, the fabric skin ripped, but then a spark must have been struck, for a hydrogen fireball suddenly exploded right in Gojiro’s hand. The monster hurled the blazing Zeppelin away from him with an angry shriek of pain.

“GGGGAAAAARRRK!”

The dome swayed dangerously. Jesus lurched sideways on the couch, Semple grabbed for it to stop herself from falling, and even Mr. Thomas staggered. Jesus’ hands flew deftly over the keypad of the remote and the environment quickly righted itself. The supposed messiah grinned. “Now he’s good and mad. There’ll be no stopping him after that.”

Mr. Thomas peered up at the screen. “Mad or not, they look like they’re going to have another try at slowing him down. There’s more aircraft coming up.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“What kind?”

The goat squinted at the forward section of the screen. “They look like Sabre Jets to me, or maybe MIG-15s. Certainly Korean War vintage.”

“So now we’re getting a bit more serious.”

The handful of jets came at Gojiro low and fast, racing across the flat desert in a perfect V formation, presumably hoping that, by staying low, they would avoid the worst of his radioactive halitosis. A thousand yards from the target, the lead plane lifted and fired a pair of wing-mounted rockets. This second attack rocked Gojiro, worse even than the exploding Zeppelin. Again he was hurt and the dome reeled as he roared in pain.

“GGGGRRRRAAAAARRRGGGHHH!”

Mr. Thomas voiced a concerned warning. “I think the Big Green’s sustained a chest wound.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t think so.”

Even though red blood ran down his chest, contrasting sharply with the green of his wrinkled hide, the great reptile didn’t appear to be weakened in any way. He seized the lead jet by the tail and, using it like a club, smashed down the next two in the formation. The fourth jet managed to loose its rockets, but the pilot must have panicked, because they flashed past wide, leaving white vapor trails. Gojiro turned and loosed his destructive breath at this and also the fifth and final jet as they screamed past him at head height. As two explosions created billows of black smoke, Jesus again grinned like a fiend. “He can be real fast when he wants to be.”

The dome was bounced around again as Gojiro performed an impromptu victory dance and Jesus laughed out loud. “I think that’s all they wrote.”

Mr. Thomas shook his head. “There’s something else coming at us.”

Jesus’ face straightened. “What?”

“It looks like a Flying Wing.”

Jesus looked puzzled. “What can they hope to achieve by that?”

“We may have a cultural reference going down here.”

Jesus’ puzzlement deepened. “Cultural reference?”

“Remember the George Pal version of War of the Worlds?”

“Of course.”

“In the movie, the Flying Wing was used to drop the atom bomb on the invading Martians.”

“You think Anubis would use an atom bomb on us? We’re already real close to the city suburbs. He’d kill a lot of his own people.”

Semple supplied the answer to this. “That wouldn’t bother Anubis at all. Can Gojiro survive a nuclear attack?”

Mr. Thomas looked deeply unhappy. “I very much doubt it.” Jesus was also worried. “In the movie, the Martians neutralized the bomb with their energy shields.”

Semple didn’t like the sound of this. “Do we have energy shields?”

Jesus looked up angrily. “What do you think? We’re in a fucking giant dinosaur, not a starship.”

***

The womb burst wetly and Jim found himself crawling across the overgrown, stone-flagged floor of a ruined temple. Tropical rain fell in leaden sheets, and he was immediately soaked to the skin. Miniature rivers followed the cracks and irregularities in the paving, with tiny torrents washing down the accumulated debris of leaves and twigs. Beyond the broken walls, napalm exploded, and the jungle burned despite the downpour. Helicopters clattered overhead and a stream of tracer cut through the smoke and steam of combat. Silhouetted against the explosions, a huge smiling Buddha had half its face blown away. The skeletal figure of a man in ragged olive drab squatted in the flame-shadows with his back to one of the broken walls. An M16 and a steel helmet were beside him and his poncho was pulled forward over his head to shelter him from the rain. Leaning forward with rapt concentration, under cover of the tented poncho, he was cooking up three white paramedic morphine pills in a blackened spoon over the flame of a candle in a K-ration can. A disposable syringe was clamped between his teeth. When he saw Jim crawling toward him, he fixed him with a hollow-eyed stare. “You stay the fuck away from me, okay? Fuck this up and I’ll cut you in half. It’s the last of my dope.”

Before Jim could say anything, Dr. Hypodermic came out from behind the Buddha, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, and totally out of place in his black stovepipe Abe Lincoln hat. Blue sparks clicked from his patent leather shoes and some kind of enveloping energy field stopped the rain from touching him. The junkie grunt looked up from under his poncho as though he weren’t in the least surprised to see the Voodoo Mystere. His voice had been threatening when he’d spoken to Jim, but now it turned into a complaining whine. “Look at the Buddha, man. They blew his fucking brains out.”

Dr. Hypodermic gestured soothingly with white-gloved hands. “I’m sure the Buddha will be able to handle it.”

The grunt shook his head as he drew the morphine solution up into the syringe through a ball of dirty cotton wool. “The motherfuckers didn’t have to blow a hole in his head. There was no need for that.”

Dr. Hypodermic’s death’s-head grin broadened as the junkie grunt tied off and went looking for a vein. “In half a minute, you won’t be worrying about it.”

Jim pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what game Hypodermic was playing with him, but he didn’t like it, and his own tone was very close to the junkie grunt’s whine. “You wouldn’t like to tell me why you’ve brought me here, would you?”

A burst of small-arms fire erupted in the nearby jungle, but Hypodermic didn’t even look around. “I thought the two of you should get acquainted. You both died of the same cause in the exact same second.”

“He OD’d?”

Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “Chuck here OD’d in the middle of a firefight.”

Another burst of gunfire sent Jim scrambling and rolling for the cover of a pile of wet rubble. Chuck, the junkie grunt, had pushed back his poncho. He’d found a vein, eased in the needle, and was now lovingly raising a little blood into the syringe. Jim cautiously raised his head. “He doesn’t look like he wants to be acquainted with anyone.”

“Chuck doesn’t want anything except what he’s got right now. That’s what happens when you make the end unthinkable and refuse to permit the reality of death. Chuck here’s been going around and around in the same five-and-a-half-minute cycle, shooting the same three morphine pills since the bullet ripped the top of his head off. He’s built himself a closed loop. Hell as an eternally revolving door in the worst place he ever experienced.”

“I though you said he OD’d?”

“The dope killed him, but before he even had time to fall over, a slug from a VC AK-47 lifted his scalp.”

“Isn’t what killed him kind of academic?”

“A sequence of events is a sequence of events. What he doesn’t know is that the damaged Buddha is an analog for his own head wound.”

Chuck pulled the needle out of his arm and looked blearily at Dr. Hypodermic. “I ain’t going anyplace and that’s a fact. Never leave the temple. That’s the key to everything. Never leave the temple.”

A grenade exploded somewhere on the other side of the Buddha. Jim pressed himself closer to the wall. “Is this supposed to be some kind of object lesson?”

Dr. Hypodermic shook his head. “It’s just part of the tour.”

“The tour?”

“We have big things planned for you, Jim Morrison. Shall we move on? Or maybe you want to stay here with Chuck? I’m sure we can set you up with a needle and a spoon and a poncho to keep the rain off. It’s a blissfully simple existence.”

Jim was having enough trouble keeping up with the shifts and surprises Dr. Hypodermic seemed to be springing on him. His mind felt seared from the previous plunge into discorporal pain. He sighed and leaned against the wall, letting the rain stream down his face. “Of course I don’t want to stay here. It’s a bliss I can very well do without.”

“Perhaps you’d like to go back to your Parisian bathtub?”

Jim shook his head. “You’ll do what you like, whatever I say.”

Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “C’est vrai.”

Jim smiled bitterly. “So you’ve got me. I give up. Roll me on to the next horror.”

***

“It’s gaining altitude.”

“It could actually be a bombing run.”

Semple was frightened, but she was also furious. She hadn’t allowed herself a full-blown tantrum in a very long time, but one was definitely boiling beneath the surface. “This is too fucking much. I swear. It just can’t happen to me. I’ve already been fucked up by one of Anubis’s nuclear weapons. It can’t happen twice. It just isn’t possible.”

Mr. Thomas was hardly the master of diplomacy. “It’s starting to look all too possible.”

Jesus leered at her. “It brought me to you, didn’t it?”

“And that was such a treat, wasn’t it? I got to watch you masturbate and talk to the goat.”

Mr. Thomas turned. He was clearly offended. “And what’s so bloody terrible about talking to the goat, may I ask?”

Jesus picked up the thread. “And what’s so bad about watching me masturbate? I’ve known women who were quite turned on by it.”

Semple looked at the two of them in furious bewilderment. “What’s with you two? How the fuck can you talk like that when one of Anubis’s psychotic flyboys is maybe going to drop an A-bomb on us?”

Jesus shrugged. “I’m Jesus Christ. Nothing can hurt me.”

Mr. Thomas also didn’t seem that concerned. “And I was tired of being a goat.”

“What about Gojiro? Anybody think about what happens to him?”

Jesus acknowledged this with a look of less-than-sincere sadness. “It will be a loss.”

Mr. Thomas nodded in agreement. “It will be a loss.”

Semple clenched her fists in frustrated fury. She would have punched Jesus, but she couldn’t see how it would do her any good. She also couldn’t see the point of screaming, but that didn’t stop her. “But what about me? I don’t want to be blown up by an atom bomb!”

Mr. Thomas was staring at the screen again. “A small object has just detached itself from the Flying Wing.”

***

“What is this place?”

“It’s one of the points where life and death interface.”

Jim and Hypodermic were standing together on a high ledge above a huge tunnellike cavern that seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. The air was chill with a smell of mold and cold fungi, and Jim found himself shivering helplessly. His shirt was still soaked from the downpour in the Vietnam hallucination. The cavern was a dim, gloomy, twilit place, lit only by a faint white light in the far distance. It wasn’t the physical surroundings that held Jim’s attention, though. The flat floor of the cavern was consistently inclined so it formed a long continuous slope, like a never-ending ramp, and up this ramp trudged an endlessly moving tide of humanity. Heads shaved, every last one of them dressed identically in a shapeless gray coverall, they moved ever upward in a slow and weary lockstep, no military precision, but in rough ranks and rows, backs bent, shoulders drooped forward so their arms hung with a loose simian swing. They didn’t pause or even glance around at their surroundings, and their faces were made uniform by dour hopelessness. They didn’t speak, even to complain one to another, but the cavern was nonetheless filled with a perpetual, drawn-out, sighing whisper of absolute despair.

Dr. Hypodermic fixed Jim with a ruby laser gaze. “You hear that?

“What is it?”

“The breath of the dead.”

“And who are all these people?”

“A particular subsection of the recently deceased.”

“Subsection?”

The skull face displayed a singularly impatient contempt. “The regiments of the righteous, the drug-free, the ones who gratuitously ignored their imaginations and allowed their lives to be punctuated by TV commercials every eight minutes. The Great Double Helix can be a hard concept to grasp after a life of Diet Sprite, Touched by an Angel, the missionary position, and some corporate Insect King lunching on your slave-employee ass. These are the ones who did what they were told and just said no to everything that might have redeemed their miserable lives.”

“And where do they think they’re going?”

“They don’t have a clue. The only idea they have is to walk toward the light. That’s all they’ve ever heard. When dead, walk to the light. These ones will go to any white light that presents itself.”

“Will they ever make it to the pods?”

“Most will. When they finally manage to work it out. The recruiters will get some of them, though.”

“The recruiters?”

Hypodermic allowed himself a dry-bone, demigod laugh. “How do you think they keep Gehenna, Stalingrad, and Necropolis filled? Show them an Electric Xmas Tree Angel and they will follow you to the racks and the heated tongs of perdition.”

“How come I never saw this place?”

“You were one of my garcons. I spared you from this stage of things.”

“You mean I was too stoned to notice?”

“I mean you were always doomed to the fast track and the early conclusion.”

***

Semple watched transfixed as a dark speck dropped from the underside of the Flying Wing. It was so tiny that it could easily be mistaken for a fault in the screen’s image or a floating trick of the eye. That something so insignificant could pose such a terminal threat was all but inconceivable, but Semple was unfortunately all too able to conceive it. As she watched it fall, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed, she felt her body start to stiffen. Her legs felt weak and when she put a hand on the back of the couch to steady herself, her nails dug into the leather upholstery, red on black, causing deep creases. For a micromoment, she found herself fascinated by her own hand. Very soon it would be gone, never to be seen again. Her mind, even her soul, if she had such a thing, might continue, but this flesh was about to be vaporized, her body, her hair, her internal organs all gone, and the absurd comic book costume along with them.

She looked back at the screen and the bomb had grown larger. The second and third units showed that Gojiro had come to a complete stop and was sitting back on his tail staring up at it. As the bomb came silently down, one of the great reptile’s hands flashed out and, in a more-than-reptilian turn of speed, he caught the bomb. Semple, turning on her platform shoes, cringed from the screen, knowing that this move would have to detonate the nuclear device. After five seconds of nothing, she opened her eyes, scarcely daring to look. When she did look, she incredulously had to raise her superheroine visor, unable to believe what she was seeing. Gojiro sat, tossing the bomb up and down on the palm of his massive hand, not unlike George Raft with his trademark silver dollar. Quickly, she bit back a scream. “Is the damned lizard out of his mind?”

Mr. Thomas took the question literally. “He’s a lizard, so it’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it?”

Semple turned on Jesus. “Can’t you make him throw it away or get rid of it somehow?”

Jesus shrugged. “He’s running the show right now.”

“Does he even know what it is?”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “Oh, I think so.”

And with that, Gojiro tossed the atom bomb somewhat higher, caught it in his mouth, and swallowed it with a gargantuan gulp, much the way a particular kind of extrovert human might toss a peanut into his mouth, or a chocolate-covered Whopper. Semple stood stunned. “I don’t believe it.”

“Oh yes, he swallowed it.”

“What the hell happens now?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

For approximately five seconds, Gojiro sat perfectly still. His eyes closed and the enormous hawser muscles in his neck worked convulsively. Mr. Thomas stroked his beard with a front hoof. “He looks like a pachuco who swallowed a full half pint of tequila on a bet.”

“Gggggggrrrrrrrwwwwwzzzzzz.”

Gojiro let out a long rasping wheeze that reverberated through the dome like a ripple in its very fabric and caused Semple to grab again for the couch. At the end of the breath, a perfect smoke ring of brightly glowing vapor floated from his mouth.

“Krrrkkk.”

Semple’s legs felt weak. “I see it, but I hardly believe it.”

Mr. Thomas seemed equally awed and even Jesus was unable to remain totally blase. “So it seems the Big Green’s digestive track can neutralize nuclear fission.”

Semple sank down on one of the arms of the couch. “I can’t handle this and stand up at the same time.”

Jesus, on the other hand, done with being impressed by the King of the Monsters’ gastric prowess, wanted to get back to the wanton destruction of the city. “I imagine we can assume that Anubis has nothing else to throw at us.”

He keyed commands into the remote, but Gojiro remained sitting. Jesus frowned. “He refuses to move.”

“He’s just put away one hell of a snack. Perhaps he doesn’t feel too good.”

“We can’t just sit out here in the desert doing fuck-all. There’s Necropolis to tear down.”

Mr. Thomas looked at Jesus as though he secretly considered him an idiot. “After digesting an atomic blast, he may not be too hungry.”

Jesus worked the monitor again. At first it seemed as though Gojiro absolutely wasn’t going to move. Then the monster belched.

“Bbbbbrap.”

Very slowly, he lumbered to his feet. He looked around for a few moments as though confused and possibly disoriented. Sniffing the air, he appeared to make up his mind. Falteringly at first, but quickly gathering speed and momentum, he started in the direction of Necropolis.

Jesus laughed out loud. “I guess the suburbs go first.”

***

The totality of the darkness was only punctuated by the struck blue sparks that told Jim Dr. Hypodermic was still with him. All was silent except for his own breathing and the occasional reverberating rattlesnake buzz and hiss that also confirmed Hypodermic was near. Obviously the Doctor’s tour was still in progress, but Jim had no clue where they might be or even why the Mystere had brought him to this place, which seemed to be devoid of absolutely everything except their own presence. Then the light appeared. At first it was nothing more than a point, a lone and errant flame-yellow star, but as it grew in the sky, Jim could see that it was actually one point of light surrounded by a strange flattened halo. It took Jim some time to realize that what he was really seeing was a light moving across water. It was the ripples in the halo that gave it away and his whole perspective suddenly changed. He grasped that he was standing on some dry-land vantage point, overlooking a vast black unseeable sea.

In the moment the visual revelation came, Jim also heard distant music drifting like smoke across the water. Male-voice Wagnerian singing, unaccompanied but pitched to Nordic perfection in a minor key, robust but at the same time mournful. He had to wait a while longer as it drifted closer to see the source of the light and the singing. A Viking longship with dragon prow, most of its deck consumed by flames, floated silently past, followed by a second boat with a black sail and a crew of dark warriors who, with swords uplifted, sang the lament.

Jim turned to where he imagined Dr. Hypodermic to be standing. “The nine-forty-seven to Valhalla?”

“You’re beginning to learn, mon frere.”

***

Semple was gratified that the very first thing that Gojiro attacked was the same elevated highway the procession had taken on its ceremonial way to the Divine Atom Bomb Festival. His first move was to remove most of the traffic with wide sweeps of his tail. The smaller vehicles went flying with hardly a second glance from the Big Green, but then a Necropolis city omnibus attracted his attention. He picked up the double-decker in both hands and flattened it end to end, like a small boy crushing a cardboard box. He destroyed a couple of large semi trucks the same way, but then the tanks started rolling down the highway toward him. The gold-plated armor of Anubis’s crack elite came in with pennants flying and guns blazing. The peppering the tanks gave him with their cannons and heavy machine guns did Gojiro no actual bodily harm, but nonetheless irritated him intensely. Rather than deal with them piecemeal and have to tolerate the gadfly pinpricks of their firepower, he seized the two sides of the highway in his flatcar hands and began to pull up the roadbed, ripping it loose from its supporting pillars. He then proceeded to roll it up, like a crusty old carpet so reinforced with filth and chewing gum that it just had to go. The tanks tried to reverse away from him, but Gojiro could roll up highway faster than they could retreat, and they were crushed inside the curl of steel and concrete like the filling in a jelly roll.

Within the tumor in the monster’s brain, Semple watched the multiple images in awe and wonderment. “How strong is he? Are there no limits to what he can do?”

Outside the dome, blue and blinding electricity crackled as banks of synapses went into reptilian overdrive. The industrial-strength dinosaur brain-lightning was visible though the fabric of the dome/tumor, which was now translucent. Mr. Thomas looked up at Semple in the eerie flickering light. “Almost no limits on this scale. Especially when his dander’s up. The Big Green has a wicked temper.”

Semple glanced around anxiously. “Are we safe in here?”

Jesus laughed and gestured to the images. “A lot safer than in that building.”

When the roll of highway became an untidy spiral bale more than half his own considerable height, Gojiro appeared to decide that the logistics were too taxing and transferred his rage to punching the tensile integrity out of a twenty-story high-rise. Semple had never imagined that the buildings in Necropolis were particularly well made, but she hardly expected that a couple of right and left jabs to the middle floors were all it required to reduce the structure to a pillar of dust and rubble. From Semple’s point of view, the only unfortunate part of the King of the Monsters’ attack was the considerable number of wretched underclass shacks that were crushed underfoot each time he made a move. Although she had personally not fared well at the hands of the Necropolis poor, she didn’t really believe that they deserved to be trampled by a living mountain. On the other hand, it wasn’t something she was going to waste too much time or regret over. What with all the pollution, oppression, poverty, and cannibalism, for many it was probably a merciful release.

She also couldn’t quite see why the great lizard was so content to hang around in the suburbs, crushing shacks, rolling up roads, and knocking down modest buildings. “Is there any way to get him to move on to downtown? I want to see him total the palace and the TV studios.”

Jesus looked at her with one of his hand-rubbingly wolfish smiles. “Impatient for some payback?”

“Damn right I’m impatient.”

He looked down at the remote. “Then let’s see what we can do.”

***

Jim tilted the pipe to the right, about thirty degrees from the vertical, and the impossibly beautiful Asian woman applied the blue and yellow flame of the small lamp to the ball of purest tar-black Shanghai opium that nestled inside. Jim was beginning to get used to the near-seamless shifts of reality. He had quickly realized that his only safe course was to go where the Mystere took him, accept each new situation on its face value, and not struggle or kick or ask too many damn fool questions. Certainly the current environment was very easy to accept. Hanging chimes sang soft and lazy harmonics in the slight, sweet-scented breeze created by gliding fans. Candles flickered in sevens, tens, and dozens, positioned before dark mirrors and behind the diffusion of parchment screens or the refraction of the cracked leaded glass of hexagonal Tiffany shades that split light into unimagined spectra and cast soft auras of protection over all those safely gathered within.

Jim drew long and steadily on the ivory pipe and, although the tiny carved dragons didn’t actually move, the eighteen-inch tube all but had a life of its own as the living smoke insinuated the receptors of his brain, formally bowing with mandarin manners and welcoming itself as an old and valued friend before it moved on to enfold him in its perfect velvet detachment and gently lead him beyond the reach of hurt or destiny. When they had first arrived at the Palace of Mirrors, Dr. Hypodermic had told him, “Don’t get too accustomed to this place. It’s only an interlude, a rest stop before the tour continues.” He now saw the reason for the warning.

The other dragons, however-the ones on the slit silk skirt of the impossibly beautiful Asian woman’s vibrantly tight cheongsam-did move. They came animatedly alive as she replaced the long pipe in its ornate holder and got respectfully to her feet from the opium den version of the Hefner bunny dip that she had assumed while ministering to his needs. “Are you content for now?”

Jim smiled blissfully, sinking back into the fully reclined seat. Hypodermic had told him not to get too accustomed to the place, but Jim was already wishing for the interlude never to end. “I don’t think it would be possible to be any more content.”

Like the cabin attendant of some divine airline, the woman moved on to the next passenger-or client? customer? trick? Jim watched the sway of her hips and the exquisite sheen of her perfect legs. He appreciated the small reflections from the garment and the way it stretched taut as she leaned forward to address the intoxicant needs of the racked and inert figure in the recliner across the aisle. He appreciated the contours of her ass in a way that was almost completely lacking in active desire. Such was the relationship between the drug and the sex drive. Even the spurs of the flesh to that which was ultimately pleasurable were blunted to a glorious objectivity. As she held the lamp to the new pipe, the flame triggered a rainbow of hallucinations, equal in their perfection to the wafting curves of the woman’s hypnotic body. The true glory was that Jim didn’t have to do a damn thing about it. All he needed was simply to relax down into the magical wonder of it all, where the dreams were waiting to claim him. With time at least temporarily negated under the opium spell, he didn’t need to worry that Hypodermic would wake him and insist that they continue the tour of the Mystere. He didn’t even have to worry about the fact that the figure in the next recliner looked a great deal like Doc Holliday.

***

An inset window came up in the top right corner of the forward screen. Jesus smiled. To Semple’s mind, he was becoming altogether too pleased with himself as the trashing of Necropolis progressed. “I think you’ll like this.”

Gojiro was now wading knee deep in the city’s business district, wrecking imposing corporate structures left and right. A hapless Zeppelin swung into the King of the Monsters’ field of vision and was instantly incinerated by a burst of blue breath. Its hydrogen exploded like a giant phallic firecracker. Boom! Gojiro trundled on. All around him, pillars of red fire and oily black smoke marked where entire city blocks were burning, ignited by electrical sparks and the gas tanks of recklessly hurled vehicles. Gushers of steam erupted as progressive sections of the computer network blew its boilers. Jesus looked round at Semple and Mr. Thomas “Don’t you just love to see a city on fire, trapped in its own death throes?”

The great creature’s newest objective appeared to be a squat and singularly ugly double-triangle pyramid festooned with tall steel broadcast antennae and satellite uplink dishes. Semple peered at the screen. “The TV center?”

Jesus nodded. “Watch the inset.”

At that moment all the window showed was random, cathode-stream snow, but then the snow cleared and Semple found that, of all the TV shows on all the TV channels in the Afterlife, she was watching Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club. Semple blinked. “How the hell did that get there?”

“Watch and learn.”

In black and white so crude and grainy that it was almost an insult to the viewer, and with all the production quality of a snuff movie, the painted and powdered naked women Fat Ari treated as the merchandise paraded down the catwalk, smiling into the camera with painfully phony, frightened allure, and leaning forward so the potential customers on the other end of the process could clearly read the barcodes on their foreheads.

Mr. Thomas chewed a chunk of plastic packing material and snuffled through his nose. “There but for the grace of someone . . . ”

Semple looked at the goat in surprise.

“You know about me and Fat Ari?”

“Even a goat has his sources.”

Jesus glanced up from running the remote. “If you’d made it to the catwalk, I certainly would have put in a bid for you.”

“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”

Jesus shrugged. “I would have thought so.”

Mr. Thomas looked around for something else to eat. “Of course, you didn’t have a barcode . . . ”

“How the hell do you guys know all this?”

Jesus looked down at the remote as though he suddenly had something very important to do, and Mr. Thomas simply avoided her eyes. Semple, oblivious for the moment to what Gojiro might be doing outside, planted her superhero gauntlets on her hips and looked disgustedly at Jesus and the goat. “Are you telling me that you two used to sit up here and watch Necropolis TV for fun?”

Mr. Thomas nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “It can be one of the more entertaining channels for the warped of taste.”

“And did you buy any slaves?”

Mr. Thomas nodded at Jesus. “He tried it a couple of times.”

“And where are they now?”

“Unfortunately there was a bit of a screwup with the animation process when they entered the Big Green’s brain.”

Semple shook her head. “I can hardly believe you even watched this crap, let alone actually tried to buy people.”

Jesus finally contributed to the discussion by gesturing to the screen. “I somehow don’t think we’ll be doing it anymore.”

In the inset window, one of the slaves had looked up at the roof of the studio and started screaming in tight close-up. On the larger screen, Gojiro was ripping loose one of the triangular sides of the TV center. Suddenly, his forward vision was peering down into the studio where Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club was going out live. As slaves and technicians alike scattered for their lives, a huge green hand entered the black and white picture and ripped up the catwalk. A lone cameraman was sticking it out to the end, more concerned with preserving potentially historic images than his own continued continuity. Apart from the cameraman, the only individual who had stood his ground was Fat Ari himself. In fact, he actually advanced on the King of the Monsters as though completely unaware that the thing he faced was many thousands of times his own size. He stomped down the stairs from the control room, his irate tented bulk quivering with the same fury that Semple had faced when he discovered her lack of barcode.

“Do you know what you’re doing to me, you fucking mutant iguana?”

Gojiro stopped and Gojiro blinked, and then Gojiro lifted a mighty foot and brought it down with Richter-scale force, crushing Fat Ari, the intrepid camera operator, the rest of the set for Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club, and anyone else who might have remained in the vicinity. For an instant, Semple felt a twinge. Fat Ari was advanced cannibal pimp scum and definitely deserved to be flattened, but at least he had departed with class. Then she steeled her attitude.

“One down and some more to go.” She looked down at Jesus. “On to the palace?”

Jesus nodded, seemingly aware that Semple had taken charge, but having no immediate quarrel with the situation. “That won’t be a problem.”

***

Jim had entered an opium dream of unmatched extravagance, extravagance on a par with those visions of paradise Hasan-e Sabbah, the Old Man of Mountains, had offered his razor boy and blade maiden hashasheens to keep them killing and putting the fear of Allah and Hasan into the politicians of the twelfth century. Jim’s vision was a dark and smoky mirror viewed through drapes of burnished golden chiffon, which was probably in keeping with his character and disposition and with the fact that, as far as he knew, he was still somewhere in the loose confines of Hell. The vision was also colored by its origins with Dr. Hypodermic, for Hypodermic was not the kind of furnish marble pools, fleecy skies, and pliant handmaidens in any Morrison illusion of perfection. Hypodermic would never bring Jim to any Beverly Hills consumer lotus land of white-boy vices and Wonderbread sins. If Jim had indeed achieved his Xanadu, it would have to be a stately pleasure dome of night and mysterious mist, as far, far down in Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man as it was possible to go. It would hug the crags and surf and romantic chasms of ice and fire, where Alph the sacred river seethed at the apex of its ceaseless turmoil and crashed into the kraken depths of the great and sunless inward sea.

His Xanadu was a savage place and holy, both brutal and enchanted. A beast within a city, rampaging at its heart. Above the ring of Fenders and dulcimers, Bechtstein grand music loud and long, and the crash of dancing timpani and rocks, the voices of women soared as they wailed for their doomed and demon lovers amid a perfect chaos and a tranquillity of disorder that even Jim himself had never been quite able to visualize. The stillness of his dope-fiend vision was the peace in the ultimate eye of the hurricane. Why had he never thought of that before, made it his objective? The magic of the pipe had brought it all into such clear focus and sharp perspective. Previously he had only closed his eyes in holy dread and ridden upon the storm with his cold silver-ringed fingers locked into the mane of the nightmare. Around him, all was a spiral of magnificent fury. Fountains gushed scarlet flame and reptiles slithered about their business of corruption and seduction, but at the center of it all, he had finally found the strength and stability of the truly and fantastically free, free to waste an infinity of time if he so desired. Free to regard his right foot for a millennium if he so desired. To reinforce this bold discovery, his own face came toward him, with a woman, the woman, dark curls and pale, ready to reveal, repeating that it was true, it was all true, voice muffled but becoming clear, through the mirage of the ion-charged mist of Avalon, and no one cried, “Beware! Beware!” at his flashing eyes and floating hair or wove a circle around him thrice because he on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of-

“Okay. Enough, mon ami. You’re slipping into borrowed poetry. Time to wake and move.”

And Xanadu was gone and Jim was out of the dream and into a place of ice and freezing cold. “Fuck you, Hypodermic! I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

***

Semple had never seen the exterior of the palace before. Always before she had been on the inside scheming to get out; now she was on the outside scheming to destroy. From above, from the perspective of Gojiro looking down, the layout was that of an ankh enclosed within a pentagram, with tall steel and glass obelisks positioned at each of the intersecting points of the five-pointed star, and an ornamental reflecting lake in the upper teardrop of the ankh. In the design of the sweeping ground plan, Anubis had made sure his architect-priests had covered every symbolic base, but Semple knew it was going to take a great deal more than symbolism, no matter how perfectly crafted, to save the dog-god from reptile apocalypse.

Already the streets around the palace and even the palace gardens themselves were thronged with people fleeing the advancing monster. From the height of Gojiro, they formed ant-scurry patterns in and around the fake Egyptian, building-block structures. Then shots from nearer the ground started coming in on the auxiliary screens. (Again Semple wondered how the hell this was achieved.) The single-minded fear in the faces said it all. No heroics or civilized niceties like women or children first. Just run like hell and the devil take those who faltered. It was every man for himself. In a classic low-budget horror movie panic, children and senior citizens were trampled underfoot. Jesus laughed uproariously as a fat woman dropped the jewel box she’d been hugging to her ample breast. She hesitated, tempted to stoop to retrieve scattered gold and baubles. A man slammed into her and she staggered. Her black Cleopatra wig flew off. The jewelry might have been debatable, but the wig was nonnegotiable. She bent to grab for it, four more people cannoned into her, and she went down in the stampede. In the moment that the wig went flying, a pig-pink shaved head was revealed and Semple wondered if the woman and the guard who had given her barcode problems back in the city jail could be one and the same. It seemed too much of a long-shot coincidence, unless, by some strange and unknown process, the close-ups were somehow being geared to her personal payback.

At that point, whoever or whatever was directing the live coverage of Gojiro against Necropolis grew tired of close-ups of the human panic and switched back to the monster onslaught against the local real estate. As Gojiro snapped off the first obelisk he encountered and, using what was left of it as a makeshift mace, began reducing a considerable portion of the palace to random debris, the God-King’s air force decided to mount a last-ditch kamikaze defense. After the attack of the Flying Wing and the revelation that Gojiro was quite capable of swallowing a small nuclear device with no detrimental effects beyond a little flatulence and irritability, Semple would have given up and used all her remaining aircraft to get as far away from the Big Green as possible. She was well aware, though, that Anubis’s thought processes were very different from her own, and she could well imagine the dogheaded boy holed up in some deep palace bunker screaming for final death-or-glory stands by whatever was left of his armed forces. When the ill-assorted squadron came in low over the ankh in the pentagram, she was hardly surprised, and equally unmoved, as Gojiro, starting with the P51 Mustang that was leading the attack, used the obelisk to bat them out of the sky with all the ease and unconcern of a major leaguer playing amateurs. The last stand failed to so much as lay a suicidal glove on him.

After that, there was no more resistance, and the King of the Monsters fell to a routinely systematic demolition of Anubis’s palace, up one wing and down the next, like an automatic and highly inevitable wrecking machine. Semple was almost tempted to become bored, but then she spotted the cluster of tiny figures standing on a flat roof near the high point of the ankh. She looked quickly at Jesus. “Can you zoom in on something?”

“Where?”

“There.”

“There?”

“That’s right.”

He played with the remote and a new inset appeared. This time it was an overhead color shot, but not from Gojiro’s POV. (How the fuck was this being done?)

“There he is!”

And there he was. Canine head swiveling anxiously, Anubis, God-King of Necropolis, stood surrounded by harem, courtiers, and guards, both ceremonial Nubian and the more practical rocketeers with their automatic weapons, who looked equally perturbed by their situation.

Mr. Thomas shook his head in puzzlement. “What does he think he’s going to achieve by waiting around up there?”

“Maybe he’s hoping to be airlifted out.”

“You think he’s got any planes left?”

Jesus studied the screen. “Never underestimate a deity when it comes to self-preservation.”

Gojiro didn’t seem to have noticed Anubis and his court or their ongoing attempt to save themselves. He was too busy on the other side of the palace complex playing the saurian bulldozer. Semple looked at the screen more closely. “People I know are down there.”

It took the goat to state the obvious. “Hardly surprising, considering you were one of his concubines.”

“There’s Zipporah, and Parsis, and that bloody Dream Warden.”

Mr. Thomas snorted. “If Anubis had half a brain, he’d simply wind-walk out of there.”

Jesus shook his head, as though he totally understood the underlying psychology of Anubis. And quite possibly he did. “He won’t. He’s enjoyed being a god for too long. For him, starting over somewhere else would be unthinkable. He couldn’t face rebuilding his power and his environment. To re-create the entire city all over again would be close to unthinkable.”

“He isn’t going to have too much city left after the Big Green gets through with it.”

“He not only has to escape but be seen to escape, at least by what he thinks of as his loyal followers. Kind of like Hitler at the end of World War II, getting away to Argentina in the U-boat.”

Mr. Thomas belched. “Nasty little shit, that Hitler. A vegetarian, used to fart all the time. Also he didn’t drink. Never trust a man who doesn’t drink or eat meat.”

“Aren’t you a vegetarian?”

“I’m a goat. I eat anything. Barbed wire, nails, you name it.”

“I take it back.”

“You know the weirdest thing about Hitler?”

“Aside from the mustache?”

“The bastard was a lazy son of a bitch. Never got out of bed before noon, and would sit up all night watching movies.”

Semple smiled. “Just like some others we could mention.” She paused and frowned. “But how could you have known Adolf Hitler? The time frames don’t compute.”

Mr. Thomas looked a little shamefaced. “It was on this side. After the boyo had laid low for a couple of decades, Der Fuehrer decided he’d have another stab at Goetterdoemmerung and I, for my sins-quite literally for my sins-got a gig as a regimental goat in the Nibelungen Division of the Afterlife. Of course, I deserted once the Barbiturate Wars got started.”

Jesus ignored the entire exchange, even the passing reference to himself. “It’s like I was saying, if Anubis can pull off a spectacular last-minute escape, at least he’d be able to play the god in exile, and sit around conspiring and planning acts of revenge and terrorism against his supposed enemies.”

“What would be the point of that?”

“To his mind, he’d be maintaining an accepted and traditional continuation. He’d still be able to consider himself a god, albeit a god fallen on hard times. In fact, he might quite enjoy the situation. It would give him infinite scope for self-pity and acts of paranoid violence.”

“I’d be very upset if he were to get away.”

Jesus glanced at Semple. “You don’t forgive easily, do you?”

“I don’t usually forgive at all. I’m the dark half of the deal, don’t forget. Let Aimee run around granting dispensations and forgiving trespasses.” She looked at the screen, where Gojiro was still ignoring Anubis and his entourage of refugees. He appeared fixated on one particular section of palace near the lower left point of the pentagram. Not content with reducing it to rubble, he was actually digging in the rubble he’d created with his huge hands, delving into foundations and subbasements, like a dog after a deep-buried bone, tossing bits of debris over his shoulder like Henry VIII eating chicken. Semple pointed angrily. “What’s his problem? Why doesn’t he notice Anubis and his crew and do something really unpleasant to them?”

Gojiro unearthed what looked uncommonly like a large chunk of a cyclotron. Scrutinized it for about twenty seconds, licked it, and then pitched it away. Jesus turned to Semple. “Where did Anubis keep his weapons-grade uranium?”

Semple looked at him blankly. “How the hell should I know? Concubines weren’t party to that kind of information.”

“But was it someplace in the palace?”

“Yeah, I guess so. There was supposed to be this bit that no one was allowed into, with guards and steel doors and big chrome Tesla things that sparked and flashed. Anubis and the Dream Warden were always in and out of there. Sometimes girls were sent in for the scientists. At least, that was the story. I wasn’t around long enough to find out for sure.”

“That’s it, then.”

“That’s what, then?”

“He’s going after the U-248.”

Semple shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Pigs go rooting for truffles. The Big Green goes for super-enriched uranium. It’s his favorite delicacy.”

“Fuck the great green overgrown retard and his favorite delicacies. Can’t you do anything to distract him? I want that bastard Anubis chewed up and spat out.”

Mr. Thomas stared at Semple as if to bring her back to earth. People who lived in brain tumors didn’t throw rocks at the Big Green when he was on a roll. “There’s no stopping him when he’s digging for uranium.”

But, as the goat spoke, Gojiro hit paydirt. He dragged up what must have been, on any human scale, a safe the size of a large room, raised it to his mouth, and squeezed it like Popeye opening a can of spinach. Something gray and metallic squirted into his mouth. After swallowing, he sat back on his haunches with a satisfied gloat on his face. Almost immediately, all hell broke loose in the dome. The screens instantly degenerated into distorted acid-trip light shows. A distended arterial system appeared in the fabric of the structure, pulsing green-death radiance. A high-frequency shriek forced Jesus and Semple to cover their ears and almost sent Mr. Thomas into convulsions, unable as he was to do likewise with his hooves. The disruption seemed to last for around a hundred seconds and then subsided. Afterward, Mr. Thomas looked decidedly sick. “I hate it when he eats fissionable material. I swear that’s what gives him tumors.”

Semple, on the other hand, was immediately back to taking care of business. So the goat thought she was pushy. She hadn’t come all this way to be bilked out of watching Anubis get his. She rounded on Jesus. “So now that he’s had his fun, let’s get him moving again.”

Jesus shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Semple was uncomprehending. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?”

“I fear our jolly green buddy is going to be a bit sluggish for a while.”

“Sluggish?”

Mr. Thomas, who had regained some of his equilibrium, explained. “His usual pattern is to go to sleep for a while after a snack of uranium. Especially enriched uranium.”

“He can’t go to sleep now.”

Jesus shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it.”

The picture was now back intact on the auxiliary screens and it showed a King of the Monsters who was definitely looking smug and somnolent. Semple, on the other hand, was close to throwing a temper tantrum. “Can’t you give him some kind of shock?”

Again Jesus shook his head. “Nothing so he’d notice.”

“But look at the screen!” Semple pointed at two large passenger-carrying autogiros that were running low and fast straight for where Anubis and his entourage were waiting. The large, bulbous planes, with their big, forward-mounted radial engines, huge rotors, short stubby wings, red and silver livery, and art deco fuselage styling, had to be Anubis’s ace in the hole-his ticket to ride. Semple’s voice modulated toward the high C of an anguished wail. “That dog-headed fuck is going to get away! After everything, the bastard is going to escape!”

***

Jim’s breath steamed with each exhalation as he looked around at the ice cavern. The opium spell was irrevocably broken and he was cold to the point of shivering. All around, twisted glacial shapes loomed over him, as though some great cascade had been instantly frozen, only to crack under its own internal stresses and then refreeze again, leaving gaping crevasses and bottomless fissures, straining without motion against the forces of some great internalized kinetic agony. Wasn’t one of the moons of Neptune like that? So unstable that it constantly blew itself apart, but so cold that it was immediately returned to a sphere of sunless ice? Dr. Hypodermic sat some twelve or fourteen feet above where Jim was standing, angular arachnid legs formally crossed and smoking a long thin cheroot, the smoke from which drifted on an almost horizontal plane in the sub-zero air. While he sat and smoked, frost formed white on his shoulders and the crown of his stovepipe hat. “This is what used to be the very core of hell. Where Lucifer sat entombed in ice after his great bust-up with God.”

Jim turned. “I don’t see him.”

“I’m telling you how it was then, man. Not how it is now.”

“So where’s Lucifer now?”

“Quite likely playing cards in the casino with Doc Holliday.”

“Doc play cards with the devil?”

“Doc has always been a student of challenging all possible limitations.”

“But gambling with Satan?”

“Something of a tradition, n’ est-ce pas?”

Jim nodded. “I guess so. Except that I thought I saw Doc in the opium den.”

“How many places can Doc be at once? Let me count the ways.” Hypodermic produced a leather cigar case with silver fittings. “You want one of these?”

Jim nodded. “Why not?”

The Doctor tossed Jim a cheroot. He caught it deftly and with equal dexterity conjured a flame at the tip of his thumb and lit it. The smoke tasted good and he was pleased that he had accomplished everything so neatly in front of the Mystere. The Mystere, meanwhile, gestured around the ice cavern like a real estate broker hustling a client. “This place could be your fortress of solitude.”

Jim looked up quizzically. “Are you suggesting that I sign on as Superman?”

“It’s one way to go.”

“What is this? Some kind of sequence of temptations?”

“Not exactly.”

“So what is this all about?”

“It’s simple. You were a star, then you were a drunk, then you were a junkie, and that made you mine. Now I have to figure out what to do with you.”

“And you’re trying different contexts on for size?”

“You got it, mon ami.”

***

Gojiro’s eyes slowly closed and the forward screen blacked out. The second-unit images showed that the two autogiros were taking a circular course, giving the monster the widest possible berth before making the final approach to pick up Anubis and his people. Semple was bedside herself. She stood with Mr. Thomas, in her ludicrous superheroine outfit, all but beating her gloved fists on the screens in angry frustration as the autogiros slowly made their turn. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Mr. Thomas’s eyes were large and phlegmatic. “It’s the luck of the draw, girl.”

“I don’t need fucking platitudes.”

“You can’t win them all.”

“I can’t win any of them.”

Jesus put the useless remote aside and leaned back in the couch. He, too, seemed to accept the escape of Anubis as inevitable. “Self-pity is very unbecoming.”

“Fuck unbecoming. You two didn’t have to sleep with the dog-headed psychopath.”

Mr. Thomas waggled his horns. “And for that we are profoundly grateful.”

“You also didn’t nearly get blown apart by his bloody atom bomb.”

Jesus looked offended. “It brought you to us, didn’t it?”

“You said that before.”

“But it’s still true, isn’t it?”

“And, like I asked you before, what good has that done me? I’m decked out in this absurd fucking outfit, and-”

Mr. Thomas looked up at her. “I rather like the costume.”

“Then you fucking wear it. It looks dumb. It leaves me half naked. It’s uncomfortable. It constricts and cuts in all the wrong places and these boots were certainly not made for walking.”

As Semple railed against fate, Jesus, and Mr. Thomas, a mighty snore echoed through the dome. For Semple, this was the last straw. “The damned thing’s gone to sleep.”

Jesus yawned in sympathy. “I’m afraid so.”

“If you were any kind of real messiah, you’d do something. You wouldn’t just sit here in a tumor with a goat and cross-shaped pool. Jesus Christ? If you saw a real fucking cross, you’d run a mile. Three Romans with nails and no one would see you for dust.”

“Rudeness and insults are even more unattractive than self-pity.”

Semple swung around, fists clenched. This time, she was more than ready to punch out the phony Christ. Maybe a black eye and a bloody nose would do something for his calm self-satisfaction. As she turned, however, the forward screen suddenly came to life again. “What’s happening?”

“He seems to have woken up.”

The autogiros were now just a hundred yards from the roof where Anubis and the courtiers and concubines were waiting, moving slowly in for the pick-up.

Mr. Thomas was the first to grasp what was going on. “It’s the autogiros. The Big Green hates aircraft.”

The dome trembled and Jesus grabbed for the remote, at the same time looking reproachfully at Semple. “I’ll do what I can, but you really don’t deserve this after what you said to me.”

Gojiro stumbled ponderously to his feet and lurched toward the two aircraft. The autogiros immediately took evasive action, swinging away from Anubis’s rooftop refuge, but in two mighty strides the irritated monster had them within his grasp. He grabbed the nearest of the pair just behind the cockpit, literally ripping the plane out of the air and crushing it between his three-fingered hands. The pilot of the second aircraft, seeing what had happened to his partner’s machine, immediately threw his into a climbing turn, desperately trying to make both height and distance and get himself out of reach of the reptile’s clutches. Unfortunately, the Necropolis version of the autogiro was neither fast enough nor maneuverable enough to do what was required of it. A green hand flashed up and seized it firmly by the tapering tail. The pilot’s last forlorn option was simply to open the throttle as wide as he could and hope he could tear himself free by sheer raw horsepower. This theory actually worked, up to a point. The engine screamed as it revved beyond all safety limits, but instead of pulling free from the monster’s grip, it simply tore itself loose, destroying the autogiro in the process. The detached engine’s momentum carried it on and up for an instant, but then it flipped over and began to spiral crazily to the rubble below. The body of the plane remained firmly in Gojiro’s left hand. A crewman plunged through the gaping hole in the fuselage, and Gojiro glanced down as the body fluttered to earth like a twisting leaf. A mere falling human could hardly hold his attention for very long, though, and with a terminal gesture of finality he mashed the second autogiro with a thunderous clap of his hands.

Semple watched with bated breath, her previous anger forgotten, and even Jesus and Mr. Thomas were leaning in, rooting for the big guy. “Okay, now go for the people. Go for the people on the roof.”

As though for Semple’s benefit, one of the mysterious second units closed on the potential targets on the roof. To Semple’s undying delight, the God-King of Necropolis appeared on the verge of a very ugly panic. He paced and he raved and was obviously wishing that he could order violence done to someone he could hold responsible. Sadly, from Anubis’s point of view, the only entity responsible for his current predicament was green and vastly unassailable. Gojiro, on the other hand, continued to be completely unaware of Anubis’s existence.

“Get him, you great idiot.”

Of course the King of the Monsters couldn’t hear her, so she flashed around on Jesus. “Isn’t there any way you can direct his attention?”

Jesus fumbled with the remote, shaking his head. “He doesn’t seem to be interested.”

Semple’s fury rolled back in again. “Then make him interested, damn it.”

Jesus attempted a few halfhearted commands but to no avail. “He doesn’t want to know.”

“How can the damn thing be so fucking useless?”

“Wait a minute.” Mr. Thomas nodded to the screen showing the close-up of Anubis. Anubis was issuing orders to his rocketeer guards. Although the dome was not blessed with sync sound, his intention was obvious. He had clearly decided that the monster might, in fact, not be as unassailable as it appeared. The rocketeers moved to the edge of the roof and formed a double line. As one, they raised their weapons. Each jacked a round and switched to full auto. Semple could hardly contain her excitement. “Will you look at him? That half-witted maniac thinks he can hurt Gojiro with machine guns.”

***

Jim should have expected the graveyard. The disembodied pain, the opium den, the frozen heart of hell-why not a fucking graveyard? By this point, he wouldn’t have been surprised to suddenly find himself a womb-entombed fetus. Jim could, as yet, see no pattern in what Dr. Hypodermic was doing to him or doing with him. He didn’t believe the bullshit about finding him a context. Perhaps he was being sucked into some deeply convoluted Afterlife version of addiction, but he couldn’t even see a pattern that might lead to that. All he could see was that the graveyard was elaborately Catholic; white marble angels clutched their brows and wept while seeking the support of broken pillars. Porticoed family mausoleums reared like baroquely munchkin cathedrals, and flat-topped sepulchers lay sprawled so large they would do justice to a Transylvanian count. Depressed and depending willows and sinisterly contorted pines drooped over an acreage of crosses and headstones so closely packed that the avenues between them resembled the narrow streets of a dark miniature city; along them blue vaporous tumbles of wraith-fire danced and flared. Overhead, ten thousand almost unflickering stars shone down from a cold velvet sky, mirrored on the ground by ten thousand flickering candles, which dripped wax on almost very available flat surface.

Dr. Hypodermic gestured in a proprietorial manner. “You like the candles.”

Jim showed no emotion. “It’s like the lighters at the end of a Grateful Dead concert.”

“My cousin, Le Baron Samedi, spends a lot of time in places like this.”

“This isn’t a real place, though, is it?”

“It’s largely symbolic.”

The two of them drifted rather than walked through the graveyard, almost becoming an extension of the wafting wraith-fire. Jim wondered if this was how it felt to be a ghost. If it was, maybe he should try it sometime. “I hope this isn’t my funeral. I’ve already been buried.”

“This isn’t your funeral.”

“So whose funeral is it?”

“Here it is now.”

A funeral procession carrying more candles, and dressed in scarlet robes, moved down one of the broader avenues between the tombs, making for a small vacant plot with a freshly dug grave. Two Shakespearean sextons leaned on their spades and tried to look unobtrusive. A white, child-sized coffin was borne on the shoulders of four black-clad pallbearers. Jim looked hard at Hypodermic. “I asked whose funeral it is.”

The Doctor’s eyes glowed eerily. “Does it really signify?”

“It looks like a child.”

“It’s a dwarf who was bitten by a poisonous spider.”

“Can they see us?”

“They can see you, kind of.”

“What do you mean, kind of?”

“They think you’re the Gatekeeper of the Underworld. If you stick around, they’ll offer you the traditional libation. A few shots of that stuff and you can really wail.”

“Why is it I have the notion that this graveyard libation can quickly become one bad motherfucker of a habit?”

Hypodermic smiled as wryly as is possible for a naked skull. “Because you know me too well.”

“I’m starting to remember.”

Jim noticed the woman who led the mourners was carrying a gold chalice. He was all but tempted to check out the libation. “But I’m not the Gatekeeper of the Underworld.”

Dr. Hypodermic brushed tiny diamond particles like lint from one black sleeve. Where the hell had they come from? Tiny stardust from the largely symbolic sky? “The gig could be yours if you wanted it. If you got a taste for the stuff, you might really enjoy it.”

“But I don’t want it.”

“The gig or the libation?”

“Neither.”

The woman with the chalice was coming straight toward Jim. Hypodermic treated him to one of his most penetrating stares. “You sure you don’t want to try it?”

Jim shook his head. “Not even for a dwarf who’s been bitten by a poisonous spider.”

“I thought you were always ready for a new stimulant.”

Jim continued to shake his head. “I’ve got enough confusion going for me.”

“Are you turning soft on me?”

“You can’t dare me to drink it. I’m past that.”

“You’re not afraid of me anymore, are you?”

“All that stuff about finding me a context was bullshit, wasn’t it?”

Dr. Hypodermic’s eyes flickered from red to yellow and back again. “I asked you first.”

“Am I still afraid of you?”

“Right.”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

“You’re only afraid when you’re running away from me?”

“Right.”

“Then we’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”

With an illusionist’s flourish of white gloves, Dr. Hypodermic snapped his fingers and Jim found himself in a brightly lit padded cell.

***

The rocketeers opened fire and Semple had to give them credit for acting with heroic panache while engaging in what they must have known to be a suicidally impossible action. They had formed two firing lines, the front kneeling, the rear standing, and on their God-King’s command they started blasting. Even the ceremonial Nubians sought to get in on the act, taking short runs across the flat roof and gamely hurling their spears at the great beast. The spears, unfortunately, all fell short, and although the small-arms fire hit the target, it did Gojiro no harm whatsoever. All it achieved was to get his angry attention. Semple shook her head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t have thought even Anubis could combine that degree of arrogance and stupidity.”

Gojiro also looked as though he couldn’t quite believe the audacity of these human survivors. The first bursts of automatic fire hit him in the side as he sat digesting his meal of U-248. His eyes opened; he blinked three times and turned his huge head. The next burst hit him square in the face, dislodging flakes of loose skin, like dinner-plate-sized dandruff. At first he’d only been mildly interested; now he was exceedingly pissed. He flexed his shoulders at the effrontery and rose majestically to his feet.

“GGGGGGGGRRRR0000000AAAAARW!”

Again, Semple had to give the rocketeers points for blind courage. Even in the face of Gojiro, drawn up to his full height and mad as hell, they didn’t break and run. They held their orderly ranks and went right on firing. This was absolutely too much for Gojiro. He took two fast steps and, like a man who, wishing to make a dramatic point in the grip of a temper tantrum, furiously clears a shelf of ornaments with a single sweep of his arm, the reptile sent the two lines of Anubis’s masked police flying clean off the roof and out into empty air. At the same time, in the background, unnoticed by anyone-even Semple-the Dream Warden quietly vanished, leaving only a rapidly collapsing gray robe. Unable to resist the hopeless flourish, a Nubian guard hurled one last spear. With the range less than a quarter of what it had been previously, the crazy Nubian actually managed to lodge his spear in Gojiro’s left eye. It hung there for a couple of seconds before the monster blinked it away and then reached out for the unfortunate man. With an impossibly delicate neatness for one so vast, Gojiro lifted the Nubian between thumb and index finger and brought him up to eye level, turned the Nubian over twice, and then closed his fingers, squashing him to a red smear.

With the rocketeers taken out and the Nubian borne aloft to his messy fate, Anubis appeared to grasp, for the first time, that the game was up. A window appeared on the dome’s screen that showed the God-King in tight close-up. With nothing left between his holy personage and the wrath of Gojiro, his eyes widened in shock and his tongue lolled out. He seemed to be saying something, but Semple couldn’t hear the dog’s final words. “Why the fuck don’t we have sound in here?”

Anubis, still staring transfixed at Gojiro, began slowly to back away across the roof to where the near-hysterical remnants of his harem were huddled together waiting for the end. After half a dozen paces, he managed to break the paralyzing eye contact and turned and fled, pushing his way into the group of concubines and actually holding one of them, a pouty, full-breasted teenager Semple had known as Nephra, in front of him as a human shield. Semple was instantly outraged. “Will you look at that shameless son of a bitch hiding among the women? He can’t even go out with fucking dignity. He’s got to know there’s no way the body of one nubile babe, no matter how big her tits, is going to save him. Why can’t he accept that he’s pod-bound and exit with a bit of class?”

Mr. Thomas sniffed. He wasn’t taking the fate of Anubis quite as personally as Semple. “A lot of leaders have tried to get away among the women. Britain’s Charles II tried it, so did Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Jeff Davis after the Civil War.”

“But he knows he can’t escape.”

In one respect, Semple was wrong. Whether it was actually Nephra’s ample breasts or not was unclear, but when Anubis grabbed her, Gojiro did actually pause. Although he could have crushed Anubis and the women of the harem in one fell handslap, he hesitated. Inside the dome, lizard-brain fireworks were visible as synapses processed the dilemma. Could it be that the big reptile held the dogheaded king’s cowardice in as much contempt as Semple? He hardly seemed capable of such finesse, and yet there he was, standing and waiting, wondering what to do next. Semple, too, was at something of a loss. She had no personal animosity against the women. When Anubis had appeared on the rooftop, she had assumed that they would share the same fate as the other innocent victims of the razing of Necropolis-regrettable, but too damned bad. Now that Gojiro was displaying this unexpected streak of dinosaur chivalry, she saw that she was going to have to revise her ideas.

“Has he ever behaved like this before?”

Jesus shook his head. “It’s extremely peculiar. He never used to be a respecter of gender.”

Gojiro’s next move was even more peculiar. He extended a clawed index finger and pointed at Anubis. It was the simplest of gestures, but its effect on the God-King was electrifying. His dog jaw dropped; he hurled Nephra from him. Gojiro continued to point at Anubis as he ran to the edge of the roof. Now it was Anubis’s turn to hesitate. He was plainly teetering in both mind and body, unable to decide whether to jump or to wait for the Big Green to tender his fate. Semple had no doubt what she wanted him to do. “Jump, you bastard! Do the decent thing and end it now.”

But Anubis didn’t jump. Clearly, terminating his own incarnation was not a part of his nature under any circumstances. Gojiro, however, had an idea of his own about how the wretched creature should meet his fate. The monster pressed his lips together and very gently blew. The radioactive breath came in a narrow stream, but it was enough. Anubis was engulfed in flame. His entire body was burning like a torch as he lurched over the edge of the roof and fell. Arms and legs outstretched, he spun as he dropped, leaving a spiral of smoke while plummeting to the ruins below. He struck the ground on an incline of rubble beside an upended block of masonry with a tangle of steel projecting from its broken end. As sharp steel penetrated his burning body, a final hiccup of flame vaporized all that remained of Anubis.

Semple was silent for a moment. “So I guess that’s the end of that.”

Mr. Thomas asked the obvious question. “And how does it feel?”

Semple didn’t immediately answer and Jesus cut in. “The most divine of emotions is that of revenge well executed.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“To tell the truth, it doesn’t feel as good as it ought to.”

“You wanted him to suffer more? It was a long fall and he was on fire all the way down. He definitely crashed and burned.”

Semple frowned. “It’s not that. It’s just that what’s done is done, and I guess it’s over and that’s kind of hard to accept.”

The goat gave a superior sniff. “They say some people are never satisfied.”

Semple bridled. “I didn’t say that I wasn’t satisfied-”

“I’d also point out that it isn’t exactly over. The women are still there. Didn’t they used to be your co-workers?”

“What do you think he’s going to do to them?”

“I suspect that’s exactly what he’s thinking about now.”

Gojiro stood staring at the trembling group of women. Semple shuddered. “I wouldn’t like to be in their position.”

Jesus raised an eyebrow. “Do you really care?”

“They’ve got to be scared out of their minds.”

“But do you really care?”

Semple turned angrily on them. “I don’t know. I’m safe in here, so it’s all fucking hypothetical, isn’t it?”

Gojiro turned and began to walk away. The women of the harem, up to this point huddled together, started to spread out as if they couldn’t quite believe their unexpected deliverance. After a half dozen paces, though, Gojiro halted and looked back. The women also froze.

“Is he going to kill them after all?”

The thought may well have crossed the King of the Monsters’ mind. Certainly, inside the dome, Semple, Jesus, and the goat were treated to another brief synaptic fireworks display, but then the second-unit screens showed him turning again and moving on.

“He let the women go.”

“I guess he’s still into this new knight-in-shining-armor mode.”

“Yeah, but where’s he going now?”

The forward view on the screen was an extreme long shot, the replication of Gojiro’s distant gaze, fixed somewhere beyond the city limits, not only in a direction in which Semple had never been during her sojourn in the city, but directly into a totally surprising and highly colorful purple and magenta sunset.

Mr. Thomas looked worried. “Where did that fucking sunset come from?”

Jesus spread his hands. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t conjure it. Besides, the colors are just a result of crap in the air. It’s probably the dust he kicked up smashing down all those buildings.”

Mr. Thomas looked even more worried. “I think he deliberately made the sunset himself.”

Jesus shrugged. “He always gets a bit weird after he’s whacked a city.”

“He never made a sunset before.”

“You can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of theater. We’ve always known that.”

Mr. Thomas refused to let the matter drop. “I think he made the sunset to walk off into.”

“So he wants to impress the girls on the roof. So what?”

“So I think after he’s walked off into the sunset, he’ll go right on walking all the way to the polar ice cap.”

Jesus went white. “You’re not serious.”

Under stress, Mr. Thomas’s accent had become extremely Welsh. “Of course I’m bloody serious, boyo. That’s why I’m looking so worried.”

Semple interrupted. “Would someone like to tell me what’s going on here? Why should he be walking off to the polar ice cap?”

“If he’s walking off to the polar ice cap, it means he’s going to go to sleep for a couple thousand years and we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“I didn’t even know there was a polar ice cap in the Afterlife.”

“If there isn’t, he’ll make one.”

“And we’re in serious trouble.”

Semple was perplexed. “I don’t understand. What’s the problem?”

“If he goes to sleep, we’re prisoners in here for the next two millennia or more. No light, no heat, no power, no TV. We’d go insane.”

Semple looked at Jesus and the goat as though they were total idiots. “But that’s crazy. With the three of us, we ought to be able to raise the kinetic energy to wind-walk out of here.”

Jesus and Mr. Thomas exchanged glances. “Will you tell her or shall I?”

“I tried to explain it to her earlier.”

“We can’t get out of here.”

“Why not?”

Jesus shifted uncomfortably on the couch and put the remote to one side. Gojiro was now jogging steadily across the landscape with an ominous sense of purpose. “It’s the bit between the tumor and the eye. Remember the way you came in?”

Semple nodded. “Of course I remember. It wasn’t that long ago, even though it might seem like it.”

“In order to make it through there, we have to put ourselves in animation mode.”

“Mr. Thomas already told me that.”

“Well, we can’t do it anymore. The equipment broke and we couldn’t fix it.”

Semple turned sternly to the goat. “I though you said he’d forgotten how to do it. You didn’t mention equipment.”

“I was giving you the simplified version.”

Jesus arched an eyebrow. “And probably trying to make me look bad at the same time. He does that, you know?”

“But it’s true that we can’t get out of here?”

“Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

Semple thought about this for a long while. “My sibling Aimee and her nuns may be able to get us out of this.”

Mr. Thomas treated her to a long and slightly suspicious sideways look. “They could?”

“I think so.”

“How?”

“Either of you know the gold telephone trick?”