Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

Round and round and round we spun.

A gold telephone materialized out of nowhere on the balustrade of the terrace, right next to a dead cartoon bluebird. For fifteen seconds, it did absolutely nothing, and then, exactly on the sixteenth second, it rang. Aimee was so taken by surprise that she didn’t immediately answer it. No less than four of the double-time European-style rings went by before she finally picked it up and tentatively put it to her ear.

“Hello.”

All around her, Heaven had continued to deteriorate. The sky was now a perpetual slate gray. The once-lush lawns were sere, brown, and dead. The trees had lost nearly all of their leaves. The lake had turned oily and polluted and every day more dead fish floated amid the greasy green scum on its surface. Increasing numbers of cracks and structural faults had appeared in the once-pristine buildings and window glass constantly and mysteriously shattered. Strange and sinister Santa Ana–style winds came in from the mountains and whipped up vortices of garbage and dead leaves, and threatening black smoke rose from beyond the same mountains from invisible fires that never ceased burning. To add the final insult to this catalogue of environmental injuries, the young women who had once danced by the temple on the Maxfield Parrish headland now spent their time consuming a diet of vodka, recreational amphetamines, and quaaludes, and coupling in wanton lesbianism.

“Who is this? It’s a very bad connection.”

Aimee had dispatched squads of nuns to do something about these girls flaunting their depravity right under her nose, but the young women were clever. Whenever the nuns were spotted, they simply ran off into the hazy mid-distance over which Aimee now had little or no control, a less-than-stable area into which the nuns were loath to follow them. As soon as the nuns gave up the chase, the young women would reappear and, once again, start disporting themselves, large as life and twice as obscene. Since the establishment of her Heaven, Aimee had never ordered the crucifixion of a woman, but in the case of these dirty and insolent little bitch perverts she would have happily made a precedent-setting exception-had she been able to catch them. Unfortunately, they proved totally uncatchable.

“Semple? Is that you? You sound so far away.”

Her own physical condition was on an exact par with the state of affairs in Heaven. She was plagued with respiratory problems and stomach pains, and in the last few days, each time she brushed the golden tresses of which she had always been so inordinately proud, she found the bristles of the hairbrush filled with alarming quantities of dead hair.

“You’ll have to speak up. I’m having a lot of difficulty hearing you.”

Perhaps the worst of the slings and arrows to which she had become heir since Semple’s departure was the awareness that her nuns were moving ever closer to a state of mutiny. Even as she tried to make sense of the mysterious phone call, half a dozen of them stood in a watchful, conspiratorial group whispering among themselves, eavesdropping, their expressions not unlike those of a pack of carrion scavengers waiting for the prey to die. If it hadn’t been for her ability to keep conjuring Prozac, she would have given up and returned to the pods long since.

“What are you trying to tell me? You’re bringing someone to do what?”

The nuns were edging nearer. The arrival of the gold phone was an occurrence so out of the ordinary, they weren’t able to contain their red-nosed curiosity.

“You’re bringing Him? Are you serious? Him? I’m telling you, Semple, things are not good here. I don’t have the reserves or the energy to put up with any of your nonsense. If this is some joke, it’s in extremely poor taste and-”

Aimee was suddenly paying such undivided attention to what her sibling was saying at the other end of the crackling phone line that, for the first time in what seemed like an age, she had momentarily forgotten the decaying world around her, the resentful plotting nuns, and even her deteriorating health.

“Yes, yes, I realize you can’t say whether he’s authentic or not. Right at this moment, even a low-rent replica would help matters a great deal. Just as long as he has some kind of power. He’s been living where?”

Now Aimee really couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Just tell me this isn’t one of your elaborate hoaxes. Just please tell me that.”

She knew credulity might be the product of a truly desperate hope. She wanted to believe Semple so badly. “You want us to wind-walk you in?”

Maybe her sister really was on the level.

“Yes, yes, I think we can do that. In fact, I’m certain we can do that.”

What made her inclined to believe Semple was that she could already feel energy flowing into her. Even through the phone, even at an incredible distance, contact with Semple was reconstituting her strength. The possibility would very soon have to be faced that she and Semple might well be indivisible-that the bad fueled the good, that the light was only possible because of the darkness. Except that Semple sounded as though she were suffering no diminishment in her powers as a result of their separation. In fact, she sounded healthy and dangerously energetic.

“I’ll have to put the phone down and talk to the nuns about it. I won’t hang up. I’ll just put it down and go and talk to them. Hold on. Don’t go away.”

As Aimee’s energy increased, her Heaven began brightening before her eyes. The gray of the sky was slowly transformed to a faltering azure. The dead bluebird beside the phone twitched a leg, flexed the claws of one foot, stirred, then sat up. It staggered groggily to its feet and attempted a hoarse whistle. Aimee walked purposefully to the surly crew of nuns, who were looking around at these sudden changes in some surprise. Best to hit them when they were off balance.

“I need you women to do something for me right now. I want you to quickly form a circle.” They looked at her as though she were mad, but her rekindled air of authority was enough to move them. To speed them along, she clapped her hands like an impatient gym teacher. “Come along, hurry up. Everyone link hands and concentrate. My sister Semple’s is returning with a very important visitor and we have to locate her and wind-walk her in.”

One of the nuns, a malcontent barracks-room lawyer of a girl who had started out in Doc Holliday’s whorehouse and had once been called Trixie, but had changed her name to Bernadette when she took her vows and donned the habit, seemed about to make some kind of protest. Bernadette was a potential leader of mutineers if Aimee had ever seen one, and Aimee quickly cut her off. “There’s no time for any discussion. Just do it, please.”

To Aimee’s relief, Bernadette shut her mouth and grumpily took hold of the hands of the nuns on either side of her. “Just stay like that. I’m going to tell Semple that we’re ready.”

As she hurried back to the gold telephone, a miraculous rainbow appeared above the mountains. The maidens on the headland stopped their carnal cavorting and stared at it in sheepish awe. Aimee picked up the phone. “Very well. We’re ready.”

She was actually daring to hope that things might really work out for the best.

***

Jim was in a padded cell. Had he said something about a wombentombed fetus? This was close. And not only was he in the padded cell, but his arms were pinned by a strait-jacket, and they kept turning the lights on and off for random irregular periods, presumably in some totalitarian attempt at full-scale psychological disorientation. The second time they tried it, Jim had furiously yelled at them, “Don’t try the KGB shit on me. It won’t work. I took too much acid way back when.”

And yet, during the periods of darkness, Jim could clearly see a single red glowing eye peering through the peephole in the door. Jim had assumed that he’d been tossed into this illusion of stained quilt walls and catatonic boredom because of Dr. Hypodermic’s fit of pique after Jim had announced he no longer feared him. That didn’t explain, however, why the red eye fixed him like a laser in the darkness.

***

“You didn’t tell me you were bringing a goat.”

Mr. Thomas’s expression became chilly and offended. “You have something against goats, madame?”

Although everyone was trying to pretend otherwise, the McPherson sisters’ reconciliation was decidedly odd. Semple, Jesus, and Mr. Thomas had materialized in a fairly conventional shimmer in the center of the circle of nuns. Jesus, who was quickly revealed to have both an act and agenda of his own, immediately bowed low to Aimee. “I know it’s you I have to thank for sending these good nuns to the rescue, Mother Superior.”

Aimee had looked a little flustered. “I’m not the Mother Superior, my Lord. I’m-”

“But you are infinitely superior. I can see that at first glance.”

In fact, it was the nuns who were exchanging glances, and, as Semple saw it, with good reason. Semple hadn’t often witnessed flattery that so bordered on toadying. Jesus had also managed to make some fairly drastic and theatrical transformations in himself during the period of the wind-walk. While Semple had come through still in her tired superheroine costume and Mr. Thomas, too, was exactly as he’d been when they’d left the tumor, Jesus had somehow replaced the Nikes, goggles, and purple toga with a dazzling white robe, complete with a gold tie belt and matching sandals, and a realistic bleeding heart on its breast. He’d even organized himself a garish multicolored halo, straight out of a Russian Orthodox icon. Semple considered this overdoing the accessories, but Jesus appeared to be in overdoing-it mode. Back lifeside, arrant fawners had buttered up Aimee with a lickspittle abandon, but they paled in comparison to the blarney job that Jesus was giving out. The faux messiah was laying it on with a trowel, and, worse than that, Aimee was lapping it up. In fact, she was so carried away by the Christcharm that she acted decidedly offhand with the other two arrivals. First she put Mr. Thomas’s nose out of joint by treating him like a mere domestic animal; then she’d moved on to Semple, looking her up and down and inquiring with a scathing edge, “What is it that you’re wearing, my dear? Isn’t it a bit extreme, even for you?”

Semple scowled and slowly surveyed Heaven. Despite the recent general upswing, the signs of decay were still very much in evidence. “Since I appear to have pulled your chestnuts out of the fire, sister dear, I’d really recommend being a little pleasant to me by way of gratitude.” She nodded in the direction of Jesus. “You have no idea what I’ve been through to bring him here.”

Aimee arched an eyebrow. “I may have more idea than you imagine.”

Semple shook her head. “No, dear. You may think you do, but believe me, you really don’t know even a fraction of it.” She gestured to Mr. Thomas. “And if you ever speak to him disrespectfully again, you’ll have me to reckon with. He has powerful literary credentials.”

Aimee stared at the goat and the goat stared right back at her. “She’s absolutely right. I have powerful literary credentials.”

Jesus quickly stepped in, seeking to gloss over the building sibling confrontation. “Come, now, girls, let’s not have a petty squabble. Not when the two of you have just been reunited.”

Both Aimee and Semple turned and, as one, looked daggers at him. “Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further. Whatever happens while you’re here, don’t ever try to get between us.”

“Our quarrels may be a lot of things, but they are never petty.”

The nuns glanced covertly from face to face as an embarrassed silence ensued. It might have gone on for a great deal longer had not Jesus proved that, in his determination to insinuate himself into Aimee’s Heaven, he’d assumed the emotional skin of a rhinoceros. He stepped up next to Aimee and took her by the arm. “If you’re not too tired from assisting us in the wind-walk, perhaps you’d like to give me the fifty-cent tour.”

Knowing him better, Semple would never have bought this act, but Aimee immediately melted. “Of course, my Lord, I’d be honored. The sooner you see what the problems are, the sooner we can get started putting them right.”

Jesus smiled. “I can’t wait to be working with you.”

Over Aimee’s head, he shot Semple a don’t screw-things-up warning, and then he and Aimee walked away along the terrace, trailing bemused nuns behind them. Both Semple and Mr. Thomas decided to forgo the grand tour and remained right where they were. The goat thoughtfully watched the others depart. “I don’t trust those nuns.”

Semple nodded in agreement. “The sight of Jesus has temporarily confused them, but if she doesn’t play this really carefully, they’ll be at her throat pretty damn soon. At least, that’s my reading of it.”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “I think your reading is right on the money, girl.”

Semple went to the edge of the terrace and looked out across the lake. “I never did like this place. In fact, I think I’ll head out to my own happy hunting ground.”

Mr. Thomas examined one of his hooves. “Might there be something to drink in your hunting ground? A liquid trifle to enhance the happiness?”

Semple grinned. “Believe me, pal. I have a lot to drink in my little kingdom.”

***

“Enter bearing whiskey? That’s an unusual one even for you, isn’t it?”

Dr. Hypodermic came through the door of the padded cell carrying a bottle with no label that was filled with a dark amber liquid. “It’s not whiskey, it’s hundred-proof rum.”

“That makes sense.”

“I thought you might be in need of a drink.”

“Damn right I’m in need of a drink.”

Dr. Hypodermic leaned over Jim and began to unbuckle the strait-jacket. Although Jim was pleased to see the bottle of booze, he made it clear to the Mystere that he was more than marginally pissed off. “You want to tell me something?”

Hypodermic pulled off the strait-jacket. “What’s that?”

Jim flexed his cramped arms and shoulders. “What’s this padded cell routine all about? More negative reinforcement?”

The Doctor pulled the stopper from the bottle, took a hit, and then offered the bottle to Jim. “Here, drink this, mon ami. It’ll put you in a better mood.”

Jim went on massaging his shoulders and stretching his back. “I’d be in a lot better mood if I hadn’t been stuffed in a fucking strait-jacket. Do you intend explaining what that was all about?”

Hypodermic held the bottle under Jim’s nose. “Just drink.”

Jim took the bottle. The bouquet of the rum was highly seductive, but he hesitated before drinking. “This isn’t going to whisk me off to some brand-new Zen hallucination, is it?”

“It’s nothing more exotic than straight booze.”

Jim shrugged, not quite believing Hypodermic, but knowing he had little alternative. He put the neck of the bottle to this lips and discovered, as the raw fiery liquor hit his throat, that his skepticism was well founded. With an electric click and a blinding ultrawhite flash, the padded cell vanished. For a few seconds Jim was blinded by colorful retinal floaters, but as they faded he saw that he and Hypodermic were sitting, if not at the same midnight Crossroads where Long Time Robert Moore had started him on his encounter with the aliens, certainly at one that was very similar. The surrounding fields were covered by so many crop markings, they resembled graffiti in a barrio. By way of an extra nose-thumbing reminder, three Adamski saucers cruised silently across the sky in a triangular formation.

Jim looked long and hard at Dr. Hypodermic. “I can’t trust a word you say, can I?”

The Doctor grinned broadly. “Absolutely not.”

***

Semple opened the liquor cabinet for Mr. Thomas. “Help yourself.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t help myself. The hooves, you know. That’s partially why I had myself reincarnated as a goat in the first place. So I couldn’t pour the sauce for myself, if you see what I mean.”

Semple looked surprised. “I don’t usually act as bartender in my own domain.”

Mr. Thomas looked unhappy. “Then we have an impasse?”

“Not really.” Semple picked up a small bell from a side table and shook it so it tinkled musically. Almost immediately a butler entered. “You rang, my lady?”

“Indeed I did, Igor. We need drinks to be poured.”

“Yes, my lady.” Igor glanced at Mr. Thomas. “A gin and tonic, I would assume, sir?”

“How did you know that?”

“It was self-evident, sir.”

“Was it really?”

Igor was already putting ice in the glass. “Oh yes, sir.”

The goat blinked. Although Igor was not a hunchback in the strict Frankenstein tradition, he fit the bill in most other ways. Round-shouldered in his black tailcoat, he was little more than four feet tall, and his full enigmatic lips and big sad goldfish eyes prompted comparisons with Peter Lorre. He handed Semple a cognac and Mr. Thomas his gin. “Will that be all, lady and sir?”

Mr. Thomas thought about this. “Now that you mention it, I am a little peckish.”

Igor nodded. “I will attend to it straightaway.”

He left the room, but returned in a matter of seconds with a snack plate of lettuce, thistles, and two copies of Vogue. The goat looked at it delightedly. “That’s wonderful, Igor, my friend, exactly what I wanted. You could have read my mind.”

Igor bowed modestly. “I did, sir.”

Mr. Thomas frowned. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Don’t worry, sir. I never pry.”

As Igor backed out of the room bowing, Mr. Thomas looked up from his plate and glass. “Is he for real?”

Semple nodded. “Oh yes, I didn’t make him. He just turned up one day looking for a job as a domestic and he’s been with me ever since.”

“He does what he does from choice?”

“He’s just a natural seeker after servitude. He’s very good, although now and then he deliberately fucks up. It’s a sign that he wants me to give him a sound ceremonial thrashing. That’s the basic trade-off.”

“And he’s a telepath?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that too much. When one assumes a role of authority, one has to get used to the fact that no secrets can be kept from the servants.”

When Semple had returned to her sanctuary with Mr. Thomas, her first objective had been gratefully to strip off the absurd comic book costume and take a lengthy shower to wash away the accumulated depravity of the outside world. While she accomplished this, she left Mr. Thomas to his own devices in a luxury suite of rooms that had been designed to generate an atmosphere of opulent Renaissance splendor. When she returned, dressed in a robe originally designed by Gianni Versace for Lucrezia Borgia, she moved in full lady-of-the-manor mode. With a drink in her hand, she gratefully sank to a soft reclining couch littered with silk and velvet cushions. “Do you know how good it is to simply relax? I believe I’ve had an overdose of deserts, dinosaurs, and dogheaded gods.”

Unfortunately, this period of relaxation proved only the briefest respite. No sooner had she and the goat settled down to an idleness of alcohol and small talk than alarms went off all over her domain and the noisy footfalls of leather guards slapped down the corridors. The doors of the renaissance suite burst open, and four of the rubber guards hurried inside, weapons at the ready. The leader of the quartet bowed to Semple and addressed her with wheezing breathlessness. “We have detected the approach of an unannounced and unauthorized intruder, my lady.”

Semple seemed doomed to live in interesting times. Both she and Mr. Thomas got to their feet, looking around nervously. “Where exactly is this intruder supposed to arrive?”

“Right here in these rooms, my lady.”

Now Semple was really nervous. She had made a number of enemies in her recent travels, and although she hadn’t thought of it before, she supposed there was always the possibility that one or more of them might have followed her there. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the Dream Warden die on the rooftop in Necropolis. She urgently gave her orders to the guards. “Be ready to shoot on sight.”

The four rubber guards nodded, stiffened, and raised their blasters.

“If some son of a bitch has come here to make trouble, he’ll be blasted to Limbo. I’m really not in the mood for this.”

No sooner were the words out Semple’s mouth than a shimmer appeared in the exact center of the room. Quickly a materializing figure formed inside the shimmer. It was only when the shape stabilized that Semple recognized it and shouted to the guards, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! It’s Aimee, goddamn it!”

The shimmer faded and Aimee stood in the middle of the room, worried and distraught. Despite her obvious distress, Semple instantly vented all of her shock and surprise on her sister. “Why the fuck couldn’t you call first? You never come here unannounced.”

“I never come here at all.”

“All the more reason to call. My guards almost burned you down.”

“I didn’t want the nuns to know where I was going.”

Mr. Thomas lapped his gin again now that the danger had passed. “You’re having trouble with your nuns?”

Aimee glared at the goat as though he had no place to be asking her questions. Semple angrily intercepted the look. “Don’t treat Mr. Thomas like that. He’s a good friend.”

“But he came with him, with that . . . that . . . ” Aimee was at a loss for a suitably apt description.

Semple filled in for her. “Jesus?”

“He isn’t the real Christ.”

“We knew he wasn’t the genuine article. I told you that up front.”

“But you didn’t tell me what he really was.”

“What do you mean, what he really was?”

“Women have started vanishing.”

“Vanishing?”

“First it was three of the dancers on the headland. I didn’t really miss them, but now some of my nuns have disappeared . . . ”

Aimee was talking as though Jesus had already been in her Heaven for a number of days, but Semple didn’t comment on this. She was accustomed to time passing at different rates in the two neighboring environments. It always evened itself out in the end. “I don’t actually see what the problem is. So you’ve mislaid some nuns and dancing girls? Surely you can replace them.”

“That’s not the point.”

“So what is the point?”

“I think your phony Jesus has something to do with it.”

“I thought you and him were getting on like a house on fire.”

Aimee looked a little shamefaced, enough to make Semple wonder just how much of the house had been on fire. “We were getting along very well, but I couldn’t be with him every hour of the day. There were lengths of time that couldn’t be accounted for.”

“And you think he was creeping around disappearing your women?”

“That’s what the nuns think and they’re blaming me for it.”

While the two women had been talking, Mr. Thomas had started edging toward the door. Semple noticed this out of the corner of her eye and snapped at him, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

The goat did his best to present a picture of innocence. “I thought I’d go and talk to Igor. You two obviously have family business to discuss.”

“You stay exactly where you are. Don’t so much as move a hoof or I’ll turn my guards loose on you.”

Mr. Thomas looked decidedly unhappy. “I don’t see what use I can be.”

“You lived with him for fuck knows how long, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“But what?”

“I mean, this is the Afterlife, isn’t it? What does it matter if he’s a serial . . . ”

Both Aimee and Semple were stunned. “He’s a serial killer?”

The goat was defensive. “Yes, but I mean, they don’t actually die, do they? They either go back to the pods, or else it hardly matters because you can just make another one. It’s really very minor compared to what happens in some places.”

Aimee could hardly believe what she was hearing, and Semple had to remind herself what a sheltered life her sibling lived. “That’s not the point. The nuns don’t like it, and if I don’t do something about him, I’m going to have a full-scale mutiny on my hands.”

Semple peered curiously at Mr. Thomas. “How long have you known he had these kinds of . . . tastes?”

Mr. Thomas hung his head. “I guess I always suspected. Some of the things he said and the porno he liked to watch. It wasn’t until the problems with the girls from Fat Ari that I knew for sure.”

“The girls from Fat Ari weren’t lost in transit?”

Mr. Thomas shamefully shook his head. “The truth became a little twisted in the telling.”

“So why the hell didn’t you warm me later, when you knew we were coming here?”

Now the goat felt that he was on firmer ground. “It wasn’t my place to drop a dime on him. And besides, we were boxed in. We had to get out of the Big Green’s brain.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

“I am your friend. I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t know you had a problem with serial . . . ”

Aimee butted in. “Why don’t you use the word ‘murderer’? That’s what he is, isn’t it? A damned murderer?”

Semple ignored Aimee’s outburst and thought carefully. So Jesus had turned out to be a highly unpleasant kind of pervert. If all things were equal, she really ought to leave her sister to deal with it as best she could. In the Nietzschean long run, solving the problem herself would only serve to make Aimee stronger. Unfortunately, things were never that equal; blood was blood and genes were genes, and Semple simply couldn’t just leave her only sister at the mercy of rebel nuns and a phony run-amok Jesus Christ. The question also remained unresolved as to what might happen to the other sibling if one went to the pods. “We’re going to have to sort this fool out, aren’t we?”

Aimee nodded. “We are.”

Semple sighed. The cliche “No peace for the wicked” seemed to be working overtime. “Let me put on something more suitable, and we’ll be on our way. Do you think I should bring some of my guards?”

Aimee frowned. “That seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?”

Mr. Thomas now felt it was safe to make a helpful interjection. “Do the nuns have access to weapons?”

Aimee looked at him as if he were crazy. “What would nuns want with weapons?”

“You never can tell with nuns.”

Aimee was shaking her head. “Armed nuns? That’s absurd.”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “I’m glad it’s not my problem.”

Semple turned angrily on him. “Who says it’s not your problem?”

“You can’t hold me responsible for what that idiot Jesus gets up to.”

“I hold you responsible enough to take you with us.”

Mr. Thomas sighed. “Me? You’re taking me back to that ridiculous trailer-park Heaven?”

“That’s right, you.”

***

Jim took another drink. This time nothing happened. He turned back to Hypodermic. “Just what the fuck is with you? Why fucking pick on me? Or is it a thing you gods have, that you just like to mindfuck humans?”

“I suppose you think it makes us feel superior?”

“The idea did cross my mind.”

“Believe me, we don’t have to make any moves to feel superior. You humans can do it all by yourselves. Your kind can really surpass any species or culture in the field of aberrant self-destructive stupidity.”

Jim was growing very tired of the Doctor and his attitude. Only the knowledge of how the Mystere was able to hurt him stopped him from coming right out and saying so. “So what have we come back here for? Are you planning to give me back to the aliens?”

“I don’t believe the aliens want you.”

This finally pushed Jim over the line. He was on his feet facing Hypodermic, who sat, bent-legged, arms impossibly folded, with his back to a Crossroads sign written in a script that Jim didn’t recognize. Every so often, a blue spark would jump from his body. “What the fuck is your problem? I mean, okay, so I was a dope fiend at the end of my life on Earth, and according to you that makes my ass somehow belong to you. So you take me on this totally pointless trek from hallucination to hallucination, and I get hurt, then I get high, then I get frozen and scared and dumped down in Vietnam for five minutes, and at no point do you bother to explain to me what the fuck the purpose of all this is, except maybe to convince me that you’re a hundred times better than me, and all the time I’m wondering what the hell is in any of this for either of us? I mean, I hope you’re getting your kicks from all this, because I’m sure as hell not. All I know is that I’m back at the fucking Crossroads, and as far as I’m concerned, this is where I came in.”

“Have you quite finished?”

Jim shook his head. “No, but it’ll do for now.”

“You know that I could send you back to the Great Double Helix or even to Limbo?”

“Yeah, of course I know that. But you probably will anyway.”

“You’re getting exceedingly brave for a human.”

“You ever hear the expression ‘Thus far and no further’?”

“And if I said further and you said no?”

Jim glanced up as another triangular formation of UFOs crossed the sky. “I know as well as you do that there’s nothing I can do about it.” He looked back, directly into Hypodermic’s red glowing eyes. “But that’s what I’m asking you, isn’t it? Why the fuck should you want to make me go further? What percentage is there in it for either of us? The only thing you prove is that you can make a drunk and an ex-junkie do what you want. There’s no big trick in that.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you had a destiny?”

Jim’s expression became wary and suspicious. “No, not recently.”

“Maybe that’s something you should ponder on.”

“What are you trying to tell me? That you’re preparing me for some kind of destiny?”

“You wouldn’t believe that?”

“It’d be hard.”

“Some things we keep secret even from ourselves.”

Jim wasn’t letting Hypodermic get away with that piece of obliqueness. “Wait one minute . . . ” But then he was distracted by a sudden shimmer of light some fifty yards down the road. “Now what the hell is that?”

Hypodermic lazily looked around. “Probably one more fool wanting to sell his soul so he can play the damned guitar like Keith Richards. He’s hoping to find Legba, le Maitre Ka-Fu, the Master of the Crossroads, but tonight he’s only going to find disappointment.”

But the figure appearing out of the spinning shimmer was not carrying a guitar. Nothing so mundane. She was nine feet tall, not including her massive headdress of spun gold and ostrich plumes, and she wore a floor-length robe tailored from sheets of frozen flame. Danbhala La Flambeau had arrived at the Crossroads, and now Jim had two Mysteres to contend with instead of just one.

“Ca va, le bon Docteur Piqures?”

Dr. Hypodermic didn’t exactly seem pleased to see his statuesque female counterpart. “We’re talking English here.”

La Flambeau drifted toward them. Her feet didn’t touch the surface of the road. “Are you still torturing that poor boy, Hypodermic?”

“The more I try to reason with him, the more recalcitrant he does become.”

Jim glared at the Doctor. “When did you try reasoning with me, you son of a bitch?”

Hypodermic appealed to La Flambeau. “You see what I mean? Now he calls me a son of a bitch.”

“And what did you expect? The boy had to develop a backbone sooner or later.”

If Jim had been angry before, now he was furious. “Are you telling me this has been no more than some kind of bullshit boot-camp character-building exercise?”

La Flambeau smiled knowingly. “You didn’t really expect to drift through the entire Afterlife getting worthless drunk and telling everyone how you lost your memory and didn’t know which side was up, did you?”

Jim, having already faced Hypodermic, saw no reason to back down to La Flambeau, even though she did seem as formidable and direct as the Doctor was sinister and devious. “But I did lose my memory. There’s still a fuck of a lot of it missing.”

“But you didn’t lose your anger and your passion, did you?”

“I assumed a lot of that stuff was left behind on Earth.”

Now Hypodermic started in on him again. Two against one at the Crossroads. “That’s mainly because you died like a wretched defeated hophead.”

Jim didn’t like the odds at all and he reacted without thinking. “And whose fault was that?”

Both La Flambeau and Hypodermic looked at him sharply. “Yes, whose fault was that?”

Jim realized what he’d said, and all he could do was shrug. “Yeah, I guess I’m the only one who can take the bottom-line rap for that.”

La Flambeau nodded. “That, at least, is progress.”

“Progress toward what?”

“Progress to the kind of attitude you are going to need when you get where you’re going.”

“Where I’m going? There’s some kind of destination to all this?”

“Oh, indeed there is, Jim Morrison.”

Jim had fallen into these kinds of traps before. This new line of the Mysteres ’ was starting to sound like a close neighbor of Doc Holliday’s doctrine of wait and see. “And is anyone going to tell me what it might be? Or do I have to go on twisting in the wind?”

La Flambeau looked at Hypodermic. “Shall I tell him or will you?”

Hypodermic’s jaw clicked. “You tell him. I’ve spent enough time with him not to want to give him the satisfaction.”

La Flambeau smiled at Jim. “The Doctor is famous for his charm both in this world and the last.”

Jim nodded. “I’ve already observed.”

“It’s time for you to move on, Jim Morrison, and learn some new lessons. It’s time for you to visit the Island of the Gods.”

Jim took a step back. “Wait a minute-”

“There’s no time left to wait.”

“I thought time was strictly relative.”

“That doesn’t mean we have it to waste.”

“I’ve always tried to steer clear of the gods.”

“We do tend to limit the choices of humans.”

“I’ve heard things can happen to men who get too close to gods.”

“Things worse even than death?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“So you admit there may be worse things than death?”

“Is this all a subtle way of telling me that I’m going to go whether I like it or not?”

Hypodermic’s eyes glowed like heated coals. “It’s also a subtle way of telling you to be careful. On the Island of the Gods, some are not as patient and tolerant as we are.”

***

The sky of Heaven had turned a chill, early morning bleak, and the nuns wading in the water were shivering despite their green rubber thigh boots as they floated the blue-white, wet body toward the others who were waiting on the lakeshore. As they reached the shallows, more nuns got down into the water, soaking the long hems and flowing sleeves of their black habits. Very gently they lifted the corpse that had once been a woman from the water, over the lily pads, and laid it on the grass at the margin the lake. A cartoon deer came into sight from out of a grove of pines, saw what was happening, and turned tail and fled. It was plainly no place for Bambis or bluebirds. The nun Bernadette, who had been leading the search party, detached herself from the shocked group around the body, stripped off her rubber waders, and walked to where Aimee, Semple, and Mr. Thomas were waiting, flanked by a half dozen of Semple’s rubber guards. “It’s her. It’s Mary-Theresa. She’s been strangled and mutilated.”

Bernadette didn’t have to say anything else. Her expression told it all. The slaying was without question the handiwork of the nowvanished Jesus, and she, and presumably at least a majority of the other nuns, held both Aimee and Semple, who had brought him there, directly responsible. The nuns weren’t going to accept the excuse that Mary-Theresa hadn’t really died but only temporarily returned to the Great Double Helix. The suffering that had been inflicted on her before she’d discorporated was more than enough to leave her scarred for her next three or four incarnations, and the nuns wanted payback. If they couldn’t get Jesus himself, the two sisters would be the next best thing.

“He has to be found.”

“I’ve got nuns looking for him all over, but there’s a distinct chance that he’s already out of here.”

Semple and Aimee exchanged glances. The situation appeared increasingly sticky. Semple knew that all Aimee wanted to do was cut loose and rage all over her, but she wasn’t about to do it while the nuns were watching. Under the constant scrutiny, they had to maintain a united front and pray that Jesus was still around and would be caught. Semple walked past Bernadette to where the body was lying on the grass. The nuns around it glared at her with open hostility, but so far they didn’t seem to feel ready to make any kind of overt move, although one of them did snarl out of the corner of her mouth, “Why don’t you get away from her? You’re not wanted here.”

Semple glanced down at the corpse and then fixed the nun with a glacial glare. “Believe me, I don’t want to be here, either.”

It only took one long look to satisfy Semple that everything Bernadette had said was true. She turned her back on the angry nuns and returned to where Aimee was standing. “She’s right. It’s just like the other one.”

The body of Mary-Theresa wasn’t the first of Jesus’ victims to be discovered. Just four hours before, the body of one of the dancing girls from the headland had been found in the rosebushes below the terrace, bearing identical marks of violent abuse. It was clearly the worst crisis in the history of Aimee’s Heaven, and try as she might, Semple couldn’t shake a certain measure of guilt. She was the one who had set the whole nightmare train of events in motion. Back in Gojiro’s brain tumor, it seemed like a fine prank to inflict a lunatic on her sister, but now that the prank had turned into a serial killer rampage, she knew she didn’t have a moral leg to stand on. She supposed she could claim that at the time she’d had no idea of the extent of his lunacy, but she knew that plea would fail to cut much ice with either Aimee or the nuns.

Bernadette, who was rapidly emerging as the undisputed leader and primary spokeswoman of Heaven’s nuns, may have had squads searching all over the environment for the homicidal messiah, and even bluebirds recruited to act as scouts and spotters, but Semple had grave doubts about whether they were going to find him. Had she been him, she would have had her nasty fun and then been gone like a cool breeze. On the other hand, she was aware that she was making the cardinal error of equating his thought processes with her own. It was something she should long since have learned never to do. Psychos didn’t think like her or anyone else. They heard the voice of the Almighty, Sam the Dog, or the TV set in their head, and acted accordingly. Given that, it was extremely possible Jesus was still around. Such was this last straw she clutched at, but without much expectation that it would keep her afloat. Thus, when the shout went up, the tally-ho that the quarry had been sighted, Semple was among the most surprised of all.

Jesus was initially spotted by a bluebird. He was skulking and muddy, on the far side of the headland where no one ever went, because, as a piece of coherent reality, it wasn’t properly finished. Following the bluebird’s directions, the nuns gathered, and armed with rakes, hoes, shovels, and other gardening implements pressed into service as weapons, they went to intercept him in a crew only slightly more disciplined than a lynch mob. Semple sent her rubber guards with them, with instructions that they should restrain or deflect the nuns should they decide to discorporate Jesus on the spot. Semple wasn’t altogether sure, though, that the rubber guards would actually be able to pull it off. They hadn’t fared too well in the transfer from her domain to Heaven, and were looking saggy and a little strained around the seams.

Needless to say, neither Semple, Aimee, nor Mr. Thomas went with the nuns. If the search did indeed end with Jesus swinging from a stately oak, the necktie party could all too easily be expanded to include the three of them. The two sisters and the goat waited on the terrace; for the next twenty-five minutes, they listened to the shouts and the coordinating whistles as the hunters closed in.

Jesus was bruised and bloody when he was finally dragged to Aimee. He hadn’t actually been lynched, but beyond that the sisters had shown precious little mercy. His white robe was torn and filthy, his sandals were gone, and he had wisely lost the halo. For one so beat up, he showed amazingly little remorse or repentance. They brought him to the bottom of the steps that led up to the terrace, so Aimee was at least able to pass judgment while looking down at the man. For the moment, the nuns were still respecting her authority. Jesus, however, showed nothing but contempt for the ad hoc proceedings. He seemed unable to grasp that his life was at stake. His first move of defiance was to shake himself free of the nuns who were holding his arms, and angrily protest to Aimee. “Do you have no control over these maniac women?”

Semple had to admit that her sister rose to the occasion with an inspired magnificence. Despite all the tension that had gone before, she drew herself up to her full height and regarded Jesus with a demeanor of judicial frost. “From where I’m standing, I can only see one maniac.”

Jesus’ two hands indicated his injuries and disheveled clothes. “You can see what these mad bitches have done to me.”

“They are understandably angry.”

“And what right do they have to be angry?”

“Do you deny that you attacked and mutilated at least two of their number?”

“Why should I deny it? I was invited here to help you expand your environment and I presumed that I had all of its facilities at my disposal.”

Bernadette glared at him, fists and teeth clenched. “Including women to murder and mutilate according to your sick whim?”

Jesus ignored her and continued to address his remarks to Aimee. “These women I’m supposed to have attacked. What were they? Surely nothing more than property. Why should a few of them disappearing present any kind of problem? I’m entitled to my fun, aren’t I?”

This produced a noisy and dangerous outburst from the women. Unlike Semple, they hadn’t heard this glib argument before. They hadn’t known Anubis. Jesus was nunhandled and jostled, and Semple’s rubber guards moved quickly to protect him. Aimee held up her hand for silence. When the tumult finally subsided, Jesus looked around angrily. “I’m not saying another word until I get a lawyer.”

Aimee looked at him as though he were insane. “A lawyer?”

“That’s right, a lawyer.”

“You think there are lawyers in Heaven?”

He pointed to Semple. “What about her?”

Semple looked outraged. “No McPherson has ever been a lawyer. Preachers and horse thieves, maybe, but never a lawyer.”

A superior smile spread across Jesus’ face. “This trial can hardly continue if I can’t have adequate representation.”

Bernadette shouted angrily, “You can speak for yourself, can’t you?”

Now it was Aimee’s turn to look superior. “And who said this was a trial?”

Jesus’ smile faded. “So what is it, then?”

“I merely wanted to hear what you had to say before I passed sentence.”

“You can’t sentence me. I’m Jesus Christ and this is supposed to be Heaven. You’ve got a major jurisdictional problem on your hands. I’m the Son of God, damn it.” He turned and looked at the nuns. “I mean, all of you, you’re all supposed to be brides of Christ, aren’t you? So, if that’s the case, you all belong to me and you shouldn’t be creating this nonsense.”

Bernadette and the other nuns could hardly credit what they were hearing. “We don’t belong to you, you son of a bitch.” They gestured to Aimee. “We don’t even belong to her.”

Jesus abruptly changed tack. He became the affable, placating used-car salesman. “Okay, okay. I tell you what. Let’s look at this another way. I admit that I messed up the women. It was a mistake. I confess. I shouldn’t have done it. I thought they were part of the facilities and I thought I was mutilating them in good faith, but that was an error. If anyone’s got a problem with me mutilating women, I’m sorry. Different strokes and all the rest of it. It’s probably a result of all the TV I’ve watched. But why don’t we just leave it at that? I’ll get the fuck out of here and I’ll promise to stop telling people that I’m Jesus Christ and we’ll forget the whole thing. I mean, think about it. What’s the point of sending me back to the pods? I’ll be just the same when I get out. Maybe even worse.”

When Jesus finished, an incredulous silence settled. Then a lone nun spoke in a quiet voice. “Crucify him.”

The refrain was taken up and grew louder. “Crucify him!”

“Crucify him!”

“Crucify him!”

Bernadette held up a hand and the shouting subsided. “We should do worse than crucify him. We should peel his skin off in strips.”

The idea gained an immediate constituency. “And then cut up his flesh in even smaller pieces.”

“And barbecue each piece as he’s forced to watch.”

Semple determinedly shook her head. “No barbecue. No cannibalism.”

The traditionalists began shouting again. “Crucify him!”

“Crucify him!”

“Crucify him!”

“Crucify him!”

Aimee was determined to have the last word; ever the traditionalist herself, she decided to stick with the tried and tested. “Behold the man! He shall be crucified.”

The crowd broke into wild applause. Jesus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait a minute . . . ”

Aimee looked at Bernadette. For once, they were in complete accord. “Is there a fresh cross?”

“There is.”

“Nails?”

“All we need. It only takes three.”

“Just wait a minute . . . ”

“Then take him to Golgotha and make it so.”

As Jesus was dragged away kicking and screaming, Aimee turned on Semple. “Now it’s your turn.”

“What do you mean, it’s my turn?”

“You brought that monster here, didn’t you?”

“I told you he wasn’t any real Jesus Christ, and you were more than happy to go along with the gag.”

Now that they were alone, Aimee was almost hyperventilating. “Is that what you thought it was? A gag? Just one of your accursed pranks? Do you know what you’ve done to me? Bernadette and her nuns will be at my throat the moment they’ve finished with your damned Jesus.”

Semple hadn’t realized just how tightly wrapped her sister really was. “I didn’t know he was a serial killer, goddamn it.”

“That’s your trouble, isn’t it? You never do know, do you?”

“Are you aware what I went through just to get him for you?”

“From the feedback I got, it looked like you were whoring your way across the Afterlife, and finding that creature was nothing more than an afterthought.”

Now Semple was losing her temper. “Yeah? Is that what you think?”

Aimee was turning red in the face, an effect that verged on the grotesque with her pale complexion and golden hair. “You don’t give a damn about me, do you?

Semple smiled nastily. “Why would I? As you keep telling me, I’m no good. I’m the whore, aren’t I? I’m the evil twin.”

Semple realized she shouldn’t have smiled. Aimee lost all control and began to vibrate; she was building up a head of destructive force that, when it reached a crucial peak, she would launch at Semple, blasting her to kingdom come. “Don’t start vibrating like that; you’ll hurt someone.”

Aimee’s voice became powerfully strange; Semple would have suspected demonic possession if she hadn’t known better. “Do you know how much I hate you?”

Semple raised a defensive vibration of her own. The two sisters were now close to violent conflict. “Of course I know how much you hate me. That’s why we separated. I really wouldn’t try to do anything to me, though. You’d have a lot of trouble surviving without me; you saw how things fell apart when I was away from here.”

Logic made no dent in Aimee’s fury. “And do you know how much, above everything, I hate knowing I have to keep you around?”

The sound of hammer blows came from away in Golgotha and Jesus started screaming. Semple half turned, momentarily distracted. Her guard dropped, and in the nano-instant Aimee struck.

***

Jim stepped ashore on the Island of the Gods to the sound of drums. Drums were beating all over the tropical island, and complex crossrhythms pulsed through the warm, sweet, slightly sticky air. He was already accustomed to having everything accompanied by a hollow and echoing throb, like a universal and collective heartbeat. Drums had hammered on the trireme, keeping the rowers to their designated stroke. The drummer on the galley sat central and elevated, sternward on the well deck, behind and above the tiers of oarsmen, pounding his mallets into the hard hide heads of his twin kettledrums with massive repetitive strokes of his tree-trunk arms. The drummer in his loincloth and oiled torso, and the tall broadshouldered female overseer in studded leather who wielded the whip, could almost have been brother and sister. With the woman standing well over seven feet tall and the drummer possessed of muscles beyond the wildest steroid dreams of any human bodybuilder, they seemed to be some midpoint hybrid of man and god, like the legendary Hercules or the Titans.

The trireme was longer, sleeker, and of tighter trim than the other galley that Jim had seen plowing up the Great River, but it still used bench-chained prisoners for propulsion. On his arrival Jim had wondered why the Voodoo gods didn’t use zombies to provide the manpower for the galley. He had pointed this out to Danbhala La Flambeau, who had shaken her head as if to suggest that Jim had watched too many cheap horror movies. “Zombies were ruined by George Romero, boy. These are Obeah submissives who love every minute of it.”

Jim’s major surprise had been, of course, that he, Dr. Hypodermic, and Danbhala La Flambeau hadn’t simply wind-walked directly to the island, but had set down in this galley, which was, as far as Jim could estimate, lying some ten miles off the night-shrouded coast. They had jaunted from the Crossroads to the boat by the same kind of instant special shift that Hypodermic had employed to take him to Vietnam, the padded cell, and all the rest of the locations that they had visited, and he couldn’t understand why the boat was needed as an intermediate stopover. When he asked about this, he’d received another impatient reply. “This is the transit point, the Ship of Agoueh. Everyone has to come in this way. We can’t just have people floating directly to the Island of the Gods. If we allowed that, we’d go the way of Hell and be reduced to nothing more than a tourist park.”

Not that finding himself at sea bothered Jim unduly. He actually welcomed the time aboard to acclimate to the idea that he was entering a whole new phase of his Afterlife. He was able to lean on the rail of the quarterdeck where the gods took their ease, while dolphins, orcas, and undulating manta rays lazily shadowed the boat, marlins jumped in the mid-distance, and families of sea monkeys danced in the purple troughs of the gentle swell of what, to Jim’s mind, couldn’t be anything but Byron’s wine-dark sea. He did note, however, that he was yet again traveling across the Afterlife by water and he wondered, as he stared at the approaching island, whether there was any symbolic or mystical significance to the fact that so many of his recent journeys were by made by way of river, sewer, swamp, or ocean.

The appearance of the island itself revealed very little, just a dark mass in the soft deceptive night with the red lava glow of a volcano at one end of the landmass. Jim looked a little dubiously at the volcano. He’d seen quite enough hot angry mountains lately and he hoped they weren’t becoming another recurrent motif. He couldn’t raise much enthusiasm for an Afterlife spent slowly sailing past volcanoes. He did suppose, however, that the Island of the Gods couldn’t really exist without one. Presumably some of the inhabitants actually needed to live inside it. But the red lava glow wasn’t the only illumination on the island. A thousand points of light, either moving or static, indicated that the Island of the Gods was anything but underpopulated. They winked and twinkled like tiny gems, instilling the place with the needed quality of magic, even from a distance.

Another advantage to the brief interval on the boat had been the attendants. The tall, slender, coffee-colored Amazons looked as if they came from the same basic gene pool as the drummer and the woman with the whip, and they seemed to have the sole purpose of keeping the passengers satisfied. They served him rum-based fruit drinks that came complete with slices of pineapple and small paper umbrellas. One had even offered to give him a rubdown with herbs and hot oil. Jim had been sorely tempted, but he’d shot a covert glance across the quarterdeck to where the three Mysteres were deep in earnest conversation in a bizarre and lilting Creole patois. In addition to the Doctor and Danbhala La Flambeau, the Baron Tonnerre was also aboard the Ship of Agoueh. Indeed, he had been waiting in one of his elaborate, bemedaled uniforms when they’d arrived on board. The original trio was again complete, and Jim decided that maybe a massage was too frivolous for an occasion invested with such gravity, even if no one was about to tell him why. He passed up the hot oil and herb rubdown and settled for a succession of the powerful rum drinks. As a result, when the trireme shipped its oars and moored at the pier, and Jim finally descended the gangplank, he was more than three parts drunk and walking a little unsteadily.

Mercifully, Jim found he wasn’t required to walk very far. An open car with a landau top was waiting. It was unlike any car Jim had ever encountered, dwarfing any automobile he’d seen in either dream or life. The hood alone must have been thirty feet long and the tonnage of chrome outweighed that of even the most fancifully customized semi, and that wasn’t to mention the gold trim. From knowledge acquired from his long-lost hot-rod home boys back in the metalflake sixties California of Big Daddy Ed Roth and Rat Fink, Jim knew that the lustrous pearlized finish could only have been achieved by a minimum of twenty-nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer, platinum dust, and exotic fish scales. It was truly the cherry paint job of the gods. The machine might once have been a 1930s movie-star Duesenberg, but it had been stretched, enlarged, extended, and so elaborately curved and curliqued that it was scarcely recognizable. Jim wondered who might create and customize these mobile palaces for the ancient African gods. Did they dream them up themselves and just make them real in a flash of kinetic magic? Or were there somewhere, perhaps in sweating caves under the volcano, holy and secret chop shops where car-culture Leonardos pushed the envelopes of their talent, working with dedication and diligence for their exalted masters?

As Jim and the Mysteres left the pier and approached the supercar, a chauffeur opened the door for them. He wore the uniform of the Baron Tonnerre’s crack honor guard, and seemed to be yet another part human, part demigod kin of the trireme’s drummer, mistress-overseer, and attendants. Two more similarly uniformed outriders waited a little way in front of the car astride two of the largest Harley-Davidsons in creation.

From this first impression, Jim could only assume that the Voodoo pantheon did everything in massive and highly flamboyant style. This was immediately confirmed as the huge car and its outriders moved forward along the crushed-shell gravel road that led away from the harbor. Screened by stands of cypress, groves of palms, and luxurious banks of rhododendron and fire dragon, sprawling and elaborately fanciful mansions were set back from road, some lit flamboyantly like Graceland on a Tennessee summer night, others remaining masked and dark with strange flames sporadically showing at mullioned windows. In parks and gardens that were at one and the same time both wild but carefully tended, fountains sang and sparkled, and fires burned in braziers atop tall stone beacons. Big cats prowled; peacocks strutted; on one opulent lawn a herd of decorative white rhinos grazed on the greensward and cropped the shubbery. While most of these palaces and mansions favored a basic European billionaire luxury from the school of high Beverly Hills or Colombian narco lord, the open supercar twice passed the formidable, thorn-thicket outer walls of much more traditional Royal Zulu kraals from the time of Cetshwayo. He also spotted no less than four domed and minaretted quasi-mosques, a number of brick beehive structures, but with the bricks fashioned from solid gold and silver, outsized opals, and squared-off blocks of emerald and diamond. He even saw one exact reproduction of the White House, and another of the Alhambra.

When he was first told that he was going to the Island of the Gods, Jim had naively expected to find some across-the-board melting pot of religions and denominations, a place where Baal, Quetzacoatl, Crom, and the Lord Krishna all dwelled discreetly, cheek-by-jowl, like some ecumenical Olympus. In this, he discovered he had been extremely and hopelessly wrong. The Island of the Gods proved to be highly segregated, the exclusive turf of the basic Afro-Creole pantheon along with a few related and kindred spirits.

The big Duesenberg went on climbing higher and higher into the island uplands that culminated in the crater of the volcano. After a while, this started to give Jim pause. Although he was insulated by the quantities of god-rum he had consumed on the Ship of Agoueh, the idea did occur to him that, in the name of sundry gods, more than one white boy had been taken up to a volcano never to return. For a while he contemplated jumping out of the car and making a run for it; he decided against this, however, even though the open supercar was actually proceeding up the white shell road at a very stately pace. He’d noticed quite soon in the ride that, although each god was deity of the manor in his or her own enclave, the highways and byways of the island were heavily patrolled by Baron Tonnerre’s red-uniformed troopers with their peaked caps, gold lightning-flash badges, and inscrutable sunglasses even at night. Presumably their mission was to deter and eject interlopers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Even if he did manage to make a break, Jim figured he’d probably last about twenty minutes loose on his own in the tropical paradise, a very strange stranger in a very strange land.

As the crater neared, Jim increasingly worried he might be earmarked for a dive into the magma; then, to his relief, the car turned off and headed toward a projecting headland where two massive carved megaliths supported an even bigger capstone. This upper stone was shaped like an eagle with its wings extended, and the closer Jim came to this towering structure, the more he realized that he was in the presence of something incredibly old, maybe older than humanity itself. This atmosphere of the impossibly ancient begged the hallowed question of whether the gods had been around before man had crawled from the swamp, or if it had taken humanity to validate their existence. Like most right-thinking individuals, Jim had always been of the latter opinion, but the closer the supercar came to the megastructure, the less certain he became.

The white road terminated a quarter of a mile from the megaliths themselves. Beyond where the road ended, a paved walk had been laid that described a huge spiral almost the same quarter mile in diameter. The car halted and the chauffeur climbed out and opened the door for the passengers to alight. The Mysteres indicated that Jim should get out first. He glanced at Danbhala La Flambeau as he stepped down from the car. “And what happens now?”

She gestured to the ancient curving flagged pavement. “You walk the spiral while we wait for the others to come.”

***

Semple was nothing more than a mass of fragments, down with the atoms, only held in the loose amalgamation of a meteor shower by the attraction of a simple internal gravity. The single mercy was that she felt no pain. In fact, she felt hardly anything, as though she didn’t have enough singular integrity to experience any of the usual mental or physical sensations. An anger at Aimee for doing what she’d done seethed somewhere in the backwash of her previous consciousness. An unfocused fear drifted along with the knowledge she was free-falling into a total unknown, without the power to stop or even slow her headlong progress. Even when she’d died, she’d had Aimee with her as part of the composite. Now she was totally alone-more than alone, if the truth were to be told. Many familiar parts of her mind on which she had always depended were now absent, leaving her ill-equipped to deal with the shocks the future undoubtedly had in store. As far as she could tell, she was in Limbo. She had enough memory left to recall that Limbo was a place rarely mentioned in the Afterlife, the ultimate distant nothing to which a soul could be consigned to loiter in the absolute end of the void until it perhaps chanced randomly to drift in the direction of the Great Double Helix. It was probably fortunate that she didn’t have enough emotional makeup left to feel the rush of terror the prospect of Limbo usually inspired. All Semple could really do was dispassionately observe her surroundings, make of them what she could, and wait to see what would happen next.

Beneath her was a micro-world where shiny billiard-ball protons and neutrons circled majestically around clumped spheroid nuclei, and electrons sparked and flashed in spectacular displays of red, blue, and yellow primal fireworks. A small shard of her being was able to appreciate the beauty of it all. She had always imagined that the subatomic world would be a black empty space and an appreciative fraction of what remained of her mind was surprised at the jostling density of this new environment, but it also reminded her that this might not be a real subatomic environment, merely a personal interpretation of the completely unknowable.

As she drifted farther, she began to see that the animated complexity of spheres and lightning had a finite limit. At something like a curved, if not clearly defined, horizon, the bouncing, oscillating atoms and the flashing electrons ended in a seething margin of quantum foam, and beyond that was a seemingly endless black nothing, empty but for a tiny, multicolored, glowing helix. Semple knew this was the Great Double Helix, but so far away it was reduced to the insignificance of a distant nebula. Aimee’s anger had pushed her unimaginably deep into the unknown. How long would she drift helplessly before she reached a point where the pods might draw her in, and set her on the laborious uphill path to a fresh incorporation? If she got lucky and even reached the distant Double Helix, enough of her sanity might not remain for her to be worth a new persona or a new incarnation. It was lucky she didn’t have too much capacity for forward-looking fear; otherwise she might have started screaming right there and then, embarking on the lurch into dementia with no further ado.

She had assumed that the long wearisome drift into the void would be one of uniform, uneventful tedium. But then the flames appeared, directly in her path at the edge of the void, and she had to revise that idea.

***

Danbhala La Flambeau had called to Jim as he started along the path of the spiral. “Whatever happens, don’t stop until you reach the center. It’s vitally important that you don’t stop under any circumstances.”

Jim had almost stopped right there and then. His first reaction was to get the hell out, and fast. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to get the hell out to, so Jim continued along the curve of the ancient paving at a reserved saunter. If he couldn’t escape, he was probably best advised to do like Danbhala La Flambeau had told him. On the other hand, he saw no sense in rushing to whatever awaited him when he’d finished traveling this series of ever-decreasing circles.

As Jim completed his first half circle and the path led him past and away from the standing stones, the other gods started to arrive. Some arrived in custom variations of the giant limousine that had brought Jim to the standing stones-Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and Hirondels, a Cord and even an enormous Packard Patrician. Others came by more outlandish means. Marie-Louise, a frail and incredibly old woman in a mantilla and black lace shawl, drove up in an ornate open phaeton, with skeleton driver and footmen and drawn by six black horses, all wearing plumes as though for a funeral. Sarazine Jambe and Clairmesine Clairmeille both appeared in entities of pulsing, revolving light like the one that had, all that time ago, brought La Flambeau, Hypodermic, and Tonnerre to Doc Holliday’s township. The frighteningly beautiful ErzulieSeverine-Belle-Femme insinuated her presence into the area in something similar, a scintillating, undulating, and sinuously dancing aura of perfumed sexuality made glowing, dancing energy. The military form of Ogou Baba, dressed in the white cloak and spiked helmet of a Mamluk, with a gold saber hanging from his belt, rode up on a stamping, snorting, black-as-night stallion. Captain Debas thundered in, kicking up gravel, on an antique Norton motorcycle.

Jim had never seen these new gods before, but their names seemed to reverberate in his head: Kadia Bossou, Baron Le Croix, Mam’zelle Charlotte, Erzulie Taureau, Zantahi Medeh, Ou-An Ille, Gougonne Dan Leh, Man Ivan, An We-Zo, Zaou Pemba, Ti Jean Pied-Cheche, Papa Houng’to. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, they gathered around the outer perimeter of the spiral. Every single one of them would have been enough on his or her own to strike terror in the bravest of mortals; en masse, they were formidable to the point of overkill. Towering figures, in robes and headdresses, uniforms or the alluring near-nudity of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme. Some weren’t even in any approximation of human form. Erzulie Taureau was a massive Babylonian bull with gilded horns and garlands of orchids, Adahi Loko was a similarly exotic elephant, and Baron Azagon was nothing more than a living flame. As they crowded and jostled for position, auras collided and sectors of energy sparked shorts of power, headdresses bobbed and weaved, and the saber of Ogou Baba became entangled in the flowing train of Mam’zelle Charlotte, while his stallion plunged and pranced, nervous in such a vibrant crowd. The only god who was given absolute space to go and do where and what she liked was the venerable Marie-Louise.

The spectacle was such that Jim would have stopped and stared openmouthed, but Danbhala La Flambeau had told him not to stop for any reason, and he wasn’t about to buck that program now that the gods had arrived. Jim went right on walking. La Flambeau hadn’t told him not to look, and as he walked he took in every detail of this sight that few, if any, mortal humans had ever witnessed. Maybe, if he came through all this intact, he really would return to his poetry. The gathering was so close to impossible that it just had to be recorded. At the same time, though, Jim could feel that something was happening to him. Cultures as far apart as the Anastazi in New Mexico and the Druids in England had employed the power of the spiral in their religious and ecstatic ceremonies and rituals. The belief had been that to walk the spiral was, in many ways, an intoxication similar to ingesting yage, peyote, or psilocybin, and as Jim progressed along the endless circular path to the center, he started to subscribe very strongly to that arcane belief. At first it was hard to tell if anything was really amiss, whether he might be entering an altered state. To spot a hallucination is hard in a place where reality at its most normal is an almost hallucinatory condition.

By the third circuit, however, Jim was well aware that the gods had started to lurch and flow one into another, and even the ground beneath his feet was taking on some unique tactile wave patterns. Jim was getting strangely high, flying without benefit of wings, but it certainly wasn’t an unpleasant experience. He could hear the soaring tone of a distant Jimi Hendrix guitar echoing out from some other place on the mountain, and it occurred to him to question why Jimi, the Voodoo Child, wasn’t there at the gathering. He certainly deserved his place. Maybe he was elsewhere on the island, maybe the echoing guitar was real. Jim recalled their obscenely drunken nights at Steve Paul’s Scene in New York City and the last time the two had seen each other at the troubled British open-air rock festival on the Isle of Wight, just human weeks before the two of them had died. “If you’re here, man, get on down and help me out.”

Jim wasn’t joking. His legs were becoming increasingly rubbery and he was having some difficulty staying on the curving path. The inclination to lurch off to the left was increasingly powerful, but La Flambeau held him to making every effort to stay the course. No help came, however. Quite the reverse. The gods seemed to believe that Jim was the key to something and each had something to say to him. They talked at him in a way that made the words throb physically in his head, drowning out the sound of the guitar.

“We used to be the link between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.”

“But no longer.”

“Humans now come through in numbers that increase out of all proportion.”

Jim could feel the gods’ eyes boring into him.

“The humans push us farther and farther from our ancient domains, until all we have left is this island.”

“Humans die and humans die and they go on dying.”

Jim was starting to feel that the Voodoo gods held him personally responsible for their troubles. He wanted to turn and protest, but still he kept walking.

“The numbers of them expand and expand again. All the time, more and more humans crowd into what was once our world.”

As he rounded the curve that brought him to the point where he was moving back toward the megaliths, he clearly saw the red eyes of Dr. Hypodermic among all of the others. “It surely can’t be that bad.”

Hypodermic’s eyes glowed angrily in the darkness. “It’s worse than bad.”

“But you can’t hold me responsible. I didn’t want to die. I would happily have gone on living, well into the twenty-first century.”

“You humans have no respect for the unique properties of this Afterlife. You stab it with knives in the heart of the dawn. You shatter the patterns of harmony. You pay no respect to those who were here before. You waste its pure base energy in the shaping of diseased environments, built from false memories and evil dreams. You rip and you plunder, trampling underfoot the magical potential of the true treasures.”

In the background, the Hendrix guitar wailed a sustained note of raw bleak grief.

“You have all but doomed your own lifeside world and you seek to do the same to ours.”

The painfully beautiful face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, surrounded by a halo of black diamond flame, floated into Jim’s increasingly psychedelic field of vision. Jim suddenly found himself aching for the god-woman, unable to stand her expression of sad reproach. “For us, the fruitfulness of humanity is the curse of extinction. We gods, spirits, and demons are an endangered species. Do you want to see us gone from this place?”

Jim kept walking. Unbidden tears ran down his face. All he wanted was for Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme to enfold him in her arms and tell him that he was forgiven, but still he managed to keep on walking. He knew if he stopped, everything would fail. “Of course not. You’re the gods.”

The face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme was replaced by that of the incalculably ancient Marie-Louise. “Then you will do anything that we ask of you?”

The trip was becoming desperate. “Of course I will. You already know that. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“You don’t have to be told. You will know.”

Jim could feel his sanity slipping, but he kept on walking. “You keep telling me that.”

The bright black eyes in the shrunken wrinkled face penetrated clear into Jim’s soul. “That is the first thing we require of you. You must make the leap of faith. The blind leap of faith.”

Jim shook his head. The center of the circle was very close. “I’ve been leaping blind all my days. I was the fucking Lizard King!”

Marie-Louis smiled as though Jim had finally stated the obvious. “That’s why you were selected.”

The curving path ended in a flat, circular, blood-red stone, engraved with the Sword of La Place, dividing it into the equal and opposite halves, pethro and rada, the alive and the dead, the good and the evil, while the symbols of the joukoujou veves extended all around the circumference. Without knowing why, only that it needed to be done, Jim deliberately placed one foot on either side of the sword. Then he turned and screamed to the gods, “So what do I do now?”

“Face the stones.”

Jim slowly did what he was told and saw the stars. Between the stones, exactly framed by the two uprights and the lintel they supported, a geometric arrangement of nine stars blazed unwinkingly, only visible from the exact center of the spiral.

“Okay, I see the stars. It still doesn’t tell me what I do now.”

“When the other one arrives, it will begin.”

***

The flames reached out, encircling and enclosing, encompassing all the fragments that had once been Semple McPherson. The flames warmed them . . . no, more than warmed, they were being heated, moving them together, fusing one piece to the next, solidifying their integrity. Inert molecules once more moved. Old connections started to re-form, and sundered synapses began exchanging tentative sparks of data. Semple-and once more she could just about think of herself as Semple-knew an armature of being was somehow being reconstituted. She wasn’t functional enough to hope, but something was definitely happening, right in Limbo, where nothing should be happening. At the same time as this perception came to her, she was also aware of another presence beside her own, a presence that seemed to have come with the flames and the warmth. It might have been the flames themselves, but there was more to it than that. The presence radiated a comforting, if implacable strength, a strength Semple had no desire to go against, but a strength that, at that moment, was slowly and surely restoring her soul.

“What are you?”

“I am Danbhala La Flambeau and I have come to bring you out of here.”

“I don’t understand. My sister, my other half, blasted me into Limbo. It’s over for me.”

“Your sister made an angry error. Your course is not yet run.”

“My course?”

“I am Danbhala La Flambeau and I have come to bring you out of Limbo and back to the familiar Paths of the Dead.”

***

The lightning came right out of the formation of stars, and the crash of thunder that went with it all but deafened Jim. At the same time, the flash when the lightning struck the spiral completely, if temporarily, blinded him. He cringed away from the violent blue-white electrical explosion but still didn’t step out of the blood-red central circle, and his feet remained planted on either side of the Sword of La Place. Why was it that the gods had to work with so many explosions and in so many sudden furious rushes? Jim didn’t need to be any further dazzled or impressed. He was convinced. He would have yelled through the ringing in his ears, but he knew it was pointless. The gods would do what the gods had to do, without outside consultation and regardless of little things like whether one insignificant human went blind, deaf, or crazy. These sons of bitches were jerking him around the way their Greek counterparts had jerked around poor fucking Oedipus.

“If I’m so fucking insignificant, why do you feel the need to fuck with me so much?”

Even when his vision started to clear, he could see little on the other side of the spiral except an ion-shattered mist. It was only as it started to dissipate that he saw the figure of the woman. She stood swaying and then stumbled slightly. Jim couldn’t believe that she’d come with the lightning. “Semple?”

The gods had finally brought them together? For a purpose that only the gods knew? He was about to step out of the circle and go to her, but then the presence of Danbhala La Flambeau was everywhere in the spiral, authoritative and urgent. “Stay where you are! Let her come to the center! Don’t go to her or you’ll lose her!”

Jim froze. His instincts told him to go with his humanity and run to her, but the compulsion to obey La Flambeau couldn’t be fought. “Semple, it’s me, it’s Jim Morrison. We met in space and again in Hell. Follow the path. Quickly. Come to where I am. Just follow the path. You can make it.”

Semple looked around, shaky and disorientated, but Jim could only suppose that she, too, was picking up the urgency from Danbhala La Flambeau. She quickly pulled herself together and started to walk along the flagstones of the spiral. After a half dozen paces, she stumbled, but regained her grip and began walking again.

“Just follow the path. If you start to feel weird, don’t worry about it. Shut everything else out and just keep right on walking until you get to me.”

Semple’s voice faltered. “All these people, these things, what are they?”

“They’re the Voodoo pantheon.”

“The Voodoo . . . ?”

“Don’t even think about it. Just walk, okay?”

“I’m doing my best.”

Haltingly at first, but rapidly gaining strength, Semple made the circuits of the spiral, laboriously coming closer to Jim.

“I think I’m starting to hallucinate.”

“Just try to ignore it. Concentrate on walking.”

The revolutions Semple walked were growing smaller and smaller. It hardly seemed that she was walking toward Jim. She was now just going around and around him.

“Why don’t I just step across to you?”

Jim quickly shook his head. “No way. Don’t even think about it. That would trigger a disaster.”

“What’s going on here?”

“That’s the great mystery.”

“I don’t understand any of this.”

“That makes you part of a very exclusive club.”

“How can you make jokes?”

“It stops me from clutching my head and screaming.”

Semple came around the final curve, staggering and half falling toward Jim. Jim moved to catch her and bring her into the central circle. In the instant that they touched, however, a light came out of nowhere. Before either Jim or Semple had a chance to react, the two of them were enclosed in a needle of light that lanced straight up to the sky, and they rose right up with it.