Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

In room 1009...

Jim awoke in pain to a vicious morning after in the enclosed TV twilight of a cheap hotel room. The TV set opposite the bed dated back to the early fifties, an antique black and white model with the exposed picture tube mounted above a flat rectangular cabinet that contained the circuitry. The station it had been tuned to had gone off the air, and an electronic snowstorm spattered the screen, providing the only light in the room. The low white noise that accompanied it was the only sound. Jim’s first emotion was a need to kill the TV. If he’d had a gun at hand, he would have put a bullet through the damned thing right there and then and screw the fact that the report might split his suffering skull. The hotel room looked like the kind where a man should have a gun, perhaps a black Colt .45 automatic, under the pillow or in the drawer of the bedside table. The cheaply framed painting above the bed-a rearing rattlesnake on black velvet-said it all. He was in some knocked-off Jim Thompson scenario with a meat-cleaver headache and no clue as to how he came to be there. His monumental motherfucker of an alcohol hangover was further complicated by the fact that Jim, as far as he could reconstruct the pieces of the puzzle, had just awakened from a highly realized nightmare filled with primal figures from some Jungian black museum. He couldn’t recall the details, but he had the distinct impression that the primal figures were urging him to take some action-action both difficult and dangerous. He groaned; all this thinking was causing a shattering agony to lance through his head. “No more, okay? I don’t have the strength yet to crawl from this bed and start looking for clues.”

But he knew he would, even before he reached into the drawer of the nightstand to see if there really was a gun in there. Instead of a gun, he discovered a mirror, about seven by seven inches, with a single-sided razor blade, a section of red and white plastic drinking straw, and an almost immodest quantity of leftover cocaine. Idly and still mainly asleep, he licked his right index finger so some of the white powder would cling to it when he dabbed it on the mirror. When he put his powdered finger in his mouth and rubbed the coke onto his upper gum, he felt an immediate tingle. It was good shit. “Must have been some kind of party here last night.”

Other inanimate telltales of a wild revelry: a bottle of Old Crow with about two inches left in it; two glasses, one with scarlet lipstick smears; an ice bucket with about a half inch of chill water in the bottom; a brimming-over ashtray in which half the butts also bore lipstick traces. A woman had obviously been there. Where the hell was she now?

The ashtray reminded Jim that he wanted a cigarette. Moving his bleary focus a little farther afield, he spotted a crumpled but half-full pack of unfiltered, king-sized Pall Malls. It lay on the floor where it must have been dropped, next to the remnants of a torn slip and a pair of laddered nylon stockings. Clearly he and the woman had done more than just smoke, drink, and snort cocaine. As if he needed further confirmation of debauchery, there were dozens of Polaroid pictures scattered over the floor at the foot of the bed. On the flat top of the dressing table was the big early-model Land camera that must have been spitting prints all night. Jim reached down and picked up one of the nearest pictures. The grainy black and white image was unmistakable: Semple McPherson in a cheesecake standing pose. She was positioned for maximum provocation, in bra, panties, high heels, and black nylons held up by a garter belt, leaning forward to maximize her cleavage, one foot up on a chair, Blue Angel style, revealing a seductive expanse of white thigh. Her eyes stared directly into the camera, made vampire-strange by the reflection of the flash off the back of the retina. Jim reached instinctively to take a hit from what was left in the bottle of Old Crow before he picked up another of the instant prints.

The next image was again of Semple, this time topless, on all fours on the bed. Despite his headache, he leaned forward and gathered up a bunch of the Polaroids. As he rifled through them, they told a clear, if not quite consecutive story, almost an explicit photo strip cartoon, and proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Semple McPherson was absolutely devoid of erotic inhibition. He found himself looking at Semple McPherson bending over, presenting a symmetrical and almost perfect ass to the camera; Semple McPherson in only heels and stockings, legs spread and ecstatically caressing herself for full pornographic impact; Semple McPherson wearing just one stocking, hands tied with the other and gagged with a scarf, struggling against the makeshift bonds; and Semple McPherson, tongue extended, licking what Jim could only assume were his own testicles. He let out a low whistle, pain temporarily forgotten. “Go, girl! I must have been holding the camera at arm’s length to get that one.”

He flipped over more of the cardlike prints and found that he also figured in a good percentage of them. He could only assume that in these cases, Semple had been operating the camera. He appeared exhibitionistically masturbating, eyes closed, hair hanging down, half covering an expression of divine suffering; he appeared, shot from above, kneeling on the hotel carpet kissing Semple’s shoes; another arm’s-length shot revealed him suckling one of her breasts. Another sequence of pictures were of the two of them coupling in variations of an embrace so energetically passionate that it was, at times, hard to tell what limbs or areas of flesh belonged to whom. Jim wasn’t clear how these last pictures could have been taken. Either the camera was set to a time delay, or at some point a third party had been in the room. Another showed Semple half dressed, curled up in an armchair that was not now present in the hotel room, pointing the Land camera at the lens of whatever camera had taken this picture. Where had the second camera come from? While wondering about these logistics, Jim scooped up another selection of prints. At some time during the proceedings, they had become really adventurous. Both Jim and Semple were pictured near-naked in the hotel corridor and even in the elevator, obviously high on the potential risk of discovery.

Jim slowly put down the Polaroids. They were a visual record of a sexual romp that was the complete antithesis of any quick drunken tussle that might later be consumed by a whiskey blackout. This encounter had been of a duration, variety, and escalation that should have remained in his memory. “So why the fuck can’t I remember it?”

The plaintive cry jogged loose the realization: the Jungian dream hadn’t been a dream at all. Pieces began to link themselves together into the full picture. He had been in the casino; Lola had warned him to leave; then he’d been hijacked by Dr. Hypodermic and run through a tour of illusion that had culminated in an unclear sequence of noise and spiral disturbance, of an island of strange gods and violent light. It was possible that what had gone down between him and Semple was simply another illusion, and yet, as far as he knew, you couldn’t take Polaroids of a hallucination. Unless, of course, what he was going through now was the illusion . . .

“Hold it!”

Jim put the brakes on this train. He slowly and carefully lit another cigarette, hoping that the familiar and comfortable action would slow his racing thoughts. To deal with the truckload of paradox and confusion, he needed more than the last inch of Old Crow. He needed coffee. He needed a Bloody Mary. He needed room service. He needed to find out where this funky hotel was located. He reached for the old black bakelite rotary phone, but before he could pick it up, it let out an earsplitting jangle. Jim jerked and stared in horror at the thing as though it were the living cousin of the rattlesnake on black velvet. He took a long drag on the Pall Mall to calm his nerves and picked up the heavy black handset. “Hello?”

“Jim?”

“I think so.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, for chrissakes.”

“Semple?”

“Who the fuck else would it be? Is there something wrong?”

“I’m very hungover.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Could I ask you what might sound like a strange question?”

“I would have thought, after living on bourbon, depravity, and room service for almost a week, you could pretty much ask me anything. We even sent out for a pair of instant cameras.”

“Where am I?”

***

Semple glanced over her shoulder, peering around the hotel lobby through the glass of the old folding-door phone booth. Two hookers and a junkie, waiting for the pay phone, were shooting her hostile looks. Why the fuck had Morrison taken it into his head to hole up in the sleaziest hotel in all of Hell? The junkie was plainly jonesing out; the hookers had their own urgent telephonic needs. She wasn’t about to indulge Jim if he was in the throws of some lunatic fugue. “We’re in Hell, you idiot. Where do you think we are?”

“In Hell?”

“In room 807 of the Mephisto Hotel in the Third Circle, just down the street from the Grand Elevator Concourse. Is that precise enough for you?”

“Does the name Danbhala La Flambeau mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does. She’s stopped by three times to see how we were doing.”

“And has anything strange happened to you recently?”

“I woke up earlier with a tattoo I never had before. A rattlesnake on my left shoulder that I never would have chosen for myself. Does that qualify?”

“I guess so.”

She could hear the confusion in his voice. She knew Jim had a few missing parts that caused him to meander in and out of reality, but this was hardly the time to be losing control. She would have thought that, after the way they had been pushing the one-on-one envelope, he would have been solidly centered and fully focused. Semple had always believed that the phrases “fucking one’s brain out” was highly inaccurate. Excessive sex tended to make her sharper, more perceptive, and highly energized.

“Listen, my love, whatever’s going on with you, just can it, okay? We’ve got a problem and there’s no time for any cosmic wandering. You do know you’re dead, don’t you?”

Now Jim sounded impatient. “Of course I know I’m dead.”

“Just checking.”

The junkie was now peering through the glass of the phone booth. At any moment he was going to start banging on the door. “Listen carefully, Jim. This is important. We’ve got a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Doc’s in trouble.”

“Doc Holliday?”

“What other Doc do you know?”

“There’s a Dr. Hypodermic.”

“I don’t think he’d ever need your help.”

Jim had obviously forgotten that Danbhala La Flambeau had taken the time to fill Semple in on everything that had gone before with Jim and the gods-or that she’d gone on to tell them that they could amuse themselves in any way they liked until Doc surfaced but, at that point, their mission would begin in earnest.

“Doc’s in room 1009, in a poker game that’s now well into its seventh day.”

“Doc wouldn’t welcome us dragging him out of a game.”

“He’s in there with some deeply dangerous people. They’ve started playing for really weird stuff, bits of each other’s being, hearts, minds, and souls. He’s got to get out of there. He needs some kind of intervention so he can walk away while he’s still intact.”

Jim sounded a great deal less vague, like he was rising to the challenge. “And the game is right here in the Mephisto?”

“Like I said, room 1009.”

“So I’ll throw some clothes on and get up there.”

“I want to come with you.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Good idea or not, I don’t want us getting separated right now.”

“Suit yourself.”

By now the junkie was pressing his face to the dirty glass of the phone booth and tapping on the door. “Listen, Jim, I’ve got to go. I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together and then I’ll meet you by the elevator.”

As Semple stepped out of the booth, the junkie all but knocked her aside, barging past her, sweating and snarling. “You holding a fucking telethon in there?” The hookers also gave her dirty looks, but she ignored them. For the ten minutes she was allowing Jim to get himself dressed and in motion, she went into the coffee shop and bought a donut and a cup of greasy metallic coffee. The Mephisto was not noted for its cuisine, which Semple suspected had a lot to do with the quality of the clientele. In the steam and grease atmosphere, enclosed by sweating plastic panels and under merciless overbright, overhead neon, unshaven and conspiratorial men in long overcoats, anarchists perhaps, or Bolsheviks, huddled in groups of three or four at dirty tables, drinking soup and black tea while apparently plotting strange insurrections among the dead. Young women in shapeless clothing, pale as the corpses they had left behind on Earth, sat by themselves, shutting out the world with paperback anthologies of Emily Dickinson and the works of Virginia Woolf. Junkies and other addicts twitched furtively and tried not to contemplate the possible horrors of the immediate future. Cold-looking street women and lipstick boys sipped coffee while they rested their psyches and their feet. Semple took her coffee to a table occupied by a solitary woman in a simple cape and leotard, and the most elaborate pair of boots Semple had ever seen. Between foot and thigh, each boot must had over two dozen tiny buckles holding it fastened.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

The woman shook her head. “Of course not.”

Semple seated herself and picked up the donut. It was forty-eight hours stale. “That’s really an amazing pair of boots.”

The woman’s expression was entirely neutral. Her skin was coffee-colored and she had a small red caste mark in the exact center of her forehead. “Many people tell me that.”

At the end of the allotted ten minutes, Semple got up and, leaving a third of the aging donut and half of the cup of deadly coffee, walked out of the coffee shop and headed for the elevators. The woman in the buckle boots watched her as she made her exit and then continued to stare after her through the steamed-up glass of the window.

***

Semple was right, Jim noted as he closed the door behind him. It was room 807. In the time since Semple had phoned, a great deal had come back to him-most of the events on the Island of the Gods, up to the point where the light had come down and whisked them away. To his deep chagrin, however, the recent days of what Semple had described as “bourbon, depravity, and room service” were still a total and frustrating blank. Still worrying about his lessthan-complete memory, Jim started down the corridor just in time to cross paths with a large brown rat with a pink naked tail that slipped out of a door marked STAFF ONLY. The rat looked up at Jim as though he had a full and equal right to be in the corridor. “Hey, Morrison, you know Doc’s on the tenth floor and he’s not doing too well.” The rat had a thick Irish brogue.

Jim nodded. “I heard already. I’m going up there right now.”

“If you need any help, just whistle. Doc’s an old pal o’ mine.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, but how did you know my name?”

The rat shook his head. “Jayzus, you think I’m an eejit or something? Don’t I know Jim Morrison when I see him?”

***

After the third floor, Semple was the only passenger in the elevator, and when the doors opened on the eighth, Jim was standing waiting. Semple beckoned him in. “Come on. We might as well go straight up to ten.”

As he stepped into the elevator, she noticed a strange expression on his face. When the doors closed, Jim suddenly pulled her to him. His hands traveled over her intimately. “Most of the last week just came back to me. I guess it was the elevator that triggered it.”

The suddenness of it all took her breath away. Her arms went around him, and she kissed him, wide-mouthed and deep. Her legs felt weak with a sudden flow of desire. With his left hand he raised her skirt, stroking the backs of her thighs, whispering in her ear. “Now that I can remember, I want to experience you in the present. I want to live those Polaroids all over again.”

“Two floors hardly gives us time.”

Jim sighed ruefully. “I know that.”

“You’re just going to have to wait.”

The elevator doors opened. Semple took Jim by the hand. “Let’s go and see about Doc.”

They stepped out into the tenth-floor corridor, and were immediately confronted by two men walking toward them. One was an elderly transvestite in a bottle-green, satin cocktail dress that was a harmonic disaster with his sallow, heavy-jowled complexion and pet pug face. It also didn’t help that he hadn’t shaved in two days and one of his false eyelashes was missing. He was walking clumsily bowlegged in high-heeled pumps, while counting a large number of plastic gold coins into a patent leather purse. The other man was tall with the tentatively obsequious look of a longtime companion and flunky. When all of the coins were safely stowed in the bag, the transvestite glanced at his companion with a grin of unpleasant self-congratulation. “I think we got out of there just in time.”

“You know they were letting you win, Edgar.”

The transvestite looked around testily. “Of course they were letting me win. You think I’m a fool? They always let me win. Even here, they’re still afraid of me.”

As Jim and Semple passed the pair, Jim quickly leaned close and whispered, “Do you know who they are?”

Semple shook her head. “No, should I?”

“It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.”

“Here in Hell?”

“Can you think of a better place for them?”

Jim stopped walking and half turned. His face was angry and set. “I really ought to do something about that bastard.”

Semple frowned. “Like what?”

“Like punch him clear out to the pods, like payback for all the good people he fucked and fucked over.”

“We ought to be focusing on getting Doc out of the poker game.”

Hoover and Tolson were waiting for the elevator. Hoover glanced at Jim with an expression of routine contempt. Jim clenched his fists. “It’d give me a fuck of a lot of satisfaction to know I’d put J. Edgar Hoover’s lights out.”

“There’s got to be worse than him running around the Afterlife.”

“Not many.”

“We really don’t have the time. We have to concentrate on Doc. That’s what Danbhala La Flambeau said.”

***

The five-card stud was cutthroat and Doc Holliday was running on pills and fear. His lungs felt raw from too many cigars; he suspected they might be bleeding again. The various kinds of dope he’d taken were clashing with the alcohol; he was developing an epic headache from staring at the cards. His frock coat was hanging over the back of his chair, long since shucked off, sweat soaked the armpits of his evening shirt, and the lace ruffles were wilting. The game had been going on for longer than he could remember, and he knew he was in well over his head. This in itself was no big thing. He’d been in a hundred previous games-more if you counted lifeside-in which the waters had threatened to close over him. What made this one different was that Lucifer seemed to be playing for keeps. In the old days, the Prince of Darkness would have been looking for souls to come into the pot: these days, since souls no longer signified, he was into pieces of minds and memory when the chips were really down. Already one player, a bizarro in a silver suit who called himself the Saber-Toothed Kid, was lying in the back room alternately catatonic and whimpering, having anted up the connections to a selection of synapses on a marker to Lucifer when he’d been cleaned out of ready cash chasing a busted flush. No one seriously expected the Saber-Toothed Kid to recover, although the question of what to do with him when the game was over had yet to be resolved. Doc had toyed with the idea of maybe selling the Kid as a warm body to Hoover and Tolson, but had kept it to himself. It was likely others might join the bizarro before the conclusion finally came to pass.

Not that Doc was, as yet, reduced to such dire straits as parting with segments of his brain as collateral. He still had a reasonable poke of coin remaining, but he knew the vise was tightening. The amateurs and thrill-seekers had long since been whittled away; the ones who only wanted to tell the story of how they’d been there, lost their rolls, and departed. Hoover had left with Tolson, his nonplaying boyfriend, in tow-and a considerable winning poke, as was always his wont. That left just five of them at the table, and the game appeared destined to go to the death. What Doc had to do was ensure that the annihilation in question was someone’s other than his own, and this was where the fear came in. For the past few hours, he had been doing little more than holding his own. Each time his turn to deal came around, Lucifer would clamp a mechanic’s grip on the deck and spin out cards from the top, bottom, or middle, only able to cheat so overtly to the professional eye because he knew no one would have the stones to call him on it, in his own game, right there in Hell.

Lucifer was formidable in any form, but his current Ike Turner persona-processed Beatle wig and pencil mustache, ruffled disco shirt, diamond sleeve garters, open to the navel and revealing a weight of neck gold sufficient to carry him for at least three rounds of betting-gave him an ass-tightening edge. Anyone going up against him would be left in no doubt that they were finally down with the baddest in town. If anyone could match Lucifer, menace for menace, it was the inscrutable Kali, who sat directly to Lucifer’s left. Topless, as the Hindu goddess of death always appeared in statues and religious prints, with fully exposed blue-black breasts and ruby nipples, but with her extra arms retracted at the request of the other players, Kali had so far been playing an incredibly tight, nolose/no-win game, never going after any of the big rich pots. When Hoover had left, however, Kali had removed her crown of skulls, and Doc wondered if this was a sign that she was about to get serious.

Richard Nixon always played seriously, not to say deviously, but he only ever seemed to go in big-time when he was sure of his cards. So far, as revealed by the call, Nixon had yet to bluff in a major way, but with his shifting eyes, sweat beading his upper lip, and the five o’clock shadow moving toward eight or nine, it was almost impossible to guess what he was thinking. Like Kali, he had been tailgating the game most of the time, sweeping up the smaller pots to keep himself solvent but avoiding any protracted showdown with Doc or Lucifer. Doc had few worries about the final player. He was a stone-faced North Korean, a former secret policeman who had been reassigned from torturer to victim in Kim II Sung’s second-to-last purge. By all accounts, he had held out through over three weeks of physical and psychological horror before being slowly garroted by some of his former subordinates. Although a master of the implacable bluff, the secret policeman was essentially out of his league in present company, and Doc suspected he would be the next to go. His stack was already running grievously low, but Doc didn’t expect him to depart easily. Dour communist tenacity might well force him to risk his entire nervous system before he was closed out and forced to join the Saber-Toothed Kid babbling mindlessly in the adjoining room.

With the Korean eliminated, Doc would be the next logical target. Lucifer and Kali would never go after each other while humans remained to be skinned and sliced. Both were extramortals and their kind tended to engage in their one-on-one combat away from the mere human witnesses. It was always possible that they would go after Nixon next, but Doc considered this unlikely. The disgraced ex-president was a professional survivor; Doc, on the other hand, survived despite himself. Doc’s reckless potential for self-destruction was well-known. Nixon, should he lose all his money, would simply bow out, maybe even demanding the courtesy car fare traditionally due the tapped. Doc would just smile coolly and toss his entire brain into the middle with little more than a second thought. Lesser mortals might have asked him why he simply didn’t rise from the table and walk away. Doc would only have shrugged. “It’s no recreation if a man doesn’t play for blood and sanity.”

The deal passed to Lucifer once more. He tapped the deck and stood up, moving to the small wet bar to pour himself a drink. On this particular night, Lucifer was drinking turquoise science-fiction concoctions from the surface of which a heavy vapor flowed. As he moved from his chair, he glanced back at the others. “Can I get anyone else a drink while I’m up?”

Kali ignored him; she imbibed nothing except the occasional nasal pinch of a dark red powder taken from an ornate enamel and silver snuffbox with a red scorpion inlaid on the lid. Doc had a nasty feeling that the powder was dried blood of some kind, but the blood of what he neither cared to know nor speculate. In response to Lucifer’s offer, the secret policeman nodded curtly. “Whiskey.” Which, for some unknown reason, actually meant vodka. Nixon turned the prow of his ski-jump nose in Lucifer’s direction and smiled his wan smile. “I’ll have a scotch and soda, my friend, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Doc stood up. “It’s okay, I’ll pour my own.”

The last thing Doc wanted was for Lucifer to pour him a drink. He wouldn’t have put it past the Dark Disco Prince to slip him a Mickey Finn, mind-numbing or worse; although it would have had to have been a pretty damned powerful Mickey to numb Doc’s mind, considering his mighty tolerance for most drugs known to this world and the last. As Doc moved to the bar, he took a discreet pull on his pocket flask of laudanum to calm himself. The very last thing he needed was to perform a blood-hacking coughing fit for this opposition. He figured he still had a couple of hours to go before he would face the combined wiles and chicanery of Kali and Lucifer working in tandem. He knew he would be best advised to just go on walking, out of the game, out of the room, maybe out of the Mephisto Hotel, and perhaps out of Hell itself. He knew, though, that his pride wouldn’t allow it. Even if it destroyed him, no one would ever be able to say that Doc Holliday ran from a challenge, even if the challenge came from the Devil himself. He would not, however, have minded in the least if some deus ex machina had come along and interrupted the game. Where was Big-Nosed Kate to burn down the saloon?

***

A guard had been posted outside room 1009, a sumo wrestler in a voluminous yellow plaid suit that could only have come from the personal tailor of Nathan Detroit. As Jim and Semple approached the door, he simply shook his head. Jim and Semple halted. “No?”

The sumo wrestler again shook his head. “Not a prayer.”

“No one goes in?”

“No one. Boss’s orders.”

Semple was wondering whether the best tactic would be to bluster, bribe, or seduce their way past the guard. “So who’s the boss?”

The guard looked at her as though her naivete quite surpassed his understanding. “This is Hell, missy. Who the fuck do you think is the boss?”

“We need to see Doc Holliday.”

“If he’s in there at all, he’ll be coming out one of these days. You can see him then.”

“We got a call.”

The sumo wrestler shook his head for a third time. It seemed to be his sole mannerism. “Nobody called out from in there.”

Semple, with great presence of mind, produced a bag of the Hell coinage. “Doc needs more money. We were supposed to bring it to him.” Semple had decided that, of her three possible options, bribery was the only practical solution. The guard seemed unbluffable; seduction was too complicated, not to mention distasteful; it would have to come down to greasing through on a cash gratuity. She hefted the bag so the coins clinked one against the other. “I have the cash right here.”

The sumo wrestler’s eyes fixed on the bag, validating Semple’s judgment. Who said Hell was without corruption? “Why don’t you give that to me and I’ll take it in to him?”

Now it was Semple’s turn to shake her head. “I really don’t think so.”

“You don’t trust me to give it to him?”

Jim decided it was his turn to play at least a supporting role in this exercise. “It’s not that she doesn’t trust you, it’s just that she has her orders. She has to bring him the bag personally, otherwise it’s her ass.”

The guard’s eyes moved from Jim’s face to Semple’s ass. Maybe seduction might have been a better shot, but it was too late now to change trains. Semple tilted the bag and let a coin drop into the palm of her hand. The guard’s attention moved up again to where she was showing him the money. She let a second coin drop, them a third and a fourth. On five, the guard’s expression changed. He almost looked understanding. “Listen, I don’t want to see old Doc strapped for cash in a big game like this one.”

Jim smiled. “I’m sure old Doc will be very grateful.”

Semple quickly slipped half a dozen plastic coins to the sumo wrestler. Before opening the door to 1009 and easing them through, he treated them to a hard look and a quick instruction. “You’ve got five minutes and then I want you back out here. Don’t be making no noise or upsetting anyone, okay? Or your ass is mine.”

With that, he swung the door open.

***

The interior of the room was filled with an old-fashioned fug of tobacco smoke, so thick that it glowed in the areas where the light hit it. Doc and Lucifer were smoking cigars, and a hard-faced Oriental held a Turkish cigarette in a steel holder. A good many of the faceless kibitzers lined around the dark periphery of the room also had cigarettes, cigars, and cheroots burning. All focus was on the game in progress, and what light there was came from the lamp directly over the green baize poker table with the cracked, nicotine-stained Tiffany shade. It illuminated the white cards, the hands of the players, and maybe their shirt cuffs, and all the paraphernalia they had laid out on the table in front of them. As Jim and Semple entered, Lucifer was dealing a hand, and neither he nor any of the players looked up. Lucifer flipped a black ace to Doc and Jim hoped that his hole card wasn’t either of the red eights. Or maybe in Hell a dead man’s hand didn’t matter.

As quietly as they could, Jim and Semple merged with the spectators. They were inside, and if the guard outside was as good as his word, they had five minutes to figure a way to get Doc out of there. Jim spotted the small bar and decided that it was as good a spot as any to set up a vantage point-and a shot of something would certainly help him think on his feet. It was only as, with Semple right behind him, he eased toward the booze that he spotted Nixon as one of the players. In the same instant, Nixon saw him and frowned slightly, as though not quite recognizing him. Suddenly Jim knew he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut, despite what the guard outside might have told him. He stepped forward into the light and glared at Nixon. “You may well frown, you son of a bitch.”

Semple grabbed him by the arm. “Jim!”

Jim shook his head. He wasn’t going be silenced or deflected. “I may have let Hoover slide, but I’m going to have my say with this bastard.”

Doc looked up and recognized Jim. “Hello there, young Morrison.”

“Hi, Doc.”

Lucifer looked at Doc. “You know this guy?”

Doc nodded. “Sure, I know this guy. It’s Jim Morrison. A little confused and headstrong, but basically he’s all right.”

Two large men in back of Lucifer moved forward. They looked to be at least kissing cousins to the sumo wrestler outside, with very much the same taste in clothes. They waited on Lucifer for the word to remove Jim and Semple. Lucifer frowned at Doc and pointed to Semple. “And the broad?”

“Semple McPherson.”

“As in Aimee Semple McPherson?”

Doc nodded again. “The very same-at least, half of her. She’s going to be the love of young Morrison’s life.”

Semple started to protest. “Who says I’m going to be the love of his life?”

Everyone ignored her. Lucifer was studying Jim. “And what do you want here, Jim Morrison?”

“I came here to get Doc out of this game . . . ”

Lucifer shook his head. “Doc can’t leave this game. He’s still ahead. It’d be more than his reputation is worth.”

Jim gestured to Nixon. “ . . . but now that I find him here, I may have to change my plans.”

Lucifer raised an eyebrow. “You have a beef with Tricky Dick?”

“My whole generation has a beef with Tricky Dick.”

Nixon’s face twisted into a familiar sour scowl. “Are we here to play poker or listen to this hippie bum run off at the mouth?”

Lucifer smoothed his pencil mustache while he considered the situation. Kali and the Korean carefully placed their hands flat on the table. Their faces showed no easily read expression, but later Jim would swear that Kali was amused. Finally Lucifer made up his mind. “Let him say his piece. We’ve got free speech here in Hell.”

Nixon looked outraged. “I’m sorry. I really have to protest. Since when was there free speech in Hell? I never heard that. Where is that written? Particularly for long-haired troublemakers who come barging into a private card game.”

Lucifer grinned, apparently enjoying baiting the onetime president. “There’s been free speech in Hell since I said there was free speech in Hell. And besides, my boys are probably going to beat the shit out of him afterward for his temerity.”

Nixon quickly picked up on the nearest available red-herring detail. “Extreme. That’s the word. On the lifeside, I was forced to deal with these kinds of extremists all through my career.”

“You mean like your goddamned enemies list?”

“I did what was needed to protect the national security and the office of the president.”

“You had Groucho fucking Marx on your list.”

Doc leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “Groucho has already moved to the higher level. One of the fastest move-ups on record. Nearly as fast as Einstein.”

“He advocated my assassination.”

“He said you were the only dope worth shooting.”

“Is that your problem, young man? You didn’t like the way I treated Groucho Marx?”

Jim leaned angrily forward. “Yeah, I didn’t like the way you treated Groucho Marx, or the Black Panthers, or John Lennon, or the people of Cambodia, or the fact that you let tens of thousand of poor bastards like me go on dying and getting maimed so you could look good in the history books.”

“I presume you’re talking about Southeast Asia?”

“Can’t you even say Vietnam, you bastard?”

“That war is history.”

“I recently visited a kid called Chuck who’s still living it over and over.”

“You can hardly blame me if some unfortunates are unable to move on.”

“I’m not talking about blame. I’d just like to see you sharing a piece of their suffering instead of sitting here playing fat-cat five-card stud with Lucifer.”

The entire room was silent as Nixon looked coldly back at Jim. “And how exactly do you intend to do that? I would remind you that I more than earned my place here.”

“I can believe that.”

“So this is just hot air, isn’t it, Morrison? There’s really nothing you can do.”

Jim looked around the table. Everyone seemed to be waiting to hear his response. “Maybe, maybe not.” He looked at Doc “Do you still have that piece of Elvis Presley’s former property?”

Doc nodded. “I certainly do.”

“Could I take a look at it?”

Doc nodded again. “I don’t see why not.”

Nixon shook his head as though he considered Jim completely out of his mind. “Elvis Presley? My God, he was another one. A drugged-out, pill-swallowing maniac.” He turned to Kali and the Korean. “I met him, you know. He was completely insane. He actually tried to hug me, just like that crazy coon Sammy Davis.”

Kali spoke for the fist time. Her voice was a steely purr of death and seduction. “You had your photograph taken with him, though, didn’t you?”

Nixon gestured impatiently. “It was that fool Haldeman. He thought it would raise my standing with the country’s youth. But let me make it perfectly clear, I was against it. I was against the whole thing. I kid you not.”

Lucifer lit a fresh cigar. “Elvis was what he was, but the blue lights were there when he was born. No blue lights in Yorba Linda, Dick. That’s why you’re here and he moved on a long time ago, just like Groucho and Einstein.”

Nixon was about to respond to Lucifer when Doc casually pulled the Gun That Belonged to Elvis from where his coat was draped over the chair and handed it to Jim. At the sight of the pistol, the entire room froze. The Korean’s hand started to edge toward a bulge under his own uniform coat, and Kali’s extra arms rematerialized. Lucifer merely exhaled, a stream of blue smoke aimed directly at Jim. “And what do you intend to do with that?”

Nixon was now sweating profusely, his eyes fixed on the gun. “You’re being ridiculous, Morrison. You can’t kill me. I’m already dead, damn it.”

“Like Doc once told me, a golden bullet from the Gun That Belonged to Elvis might not kill you, but it’ll sure fuck you up.”

Lucifer seemed highly amused by the situation. He gestured to Jim with his cigar. “You know what would happen if you fired that thing in here?”

Jim smiled wryly. He was starting to like Lucifer, although he knew that liking the Devil was no reason to underestimate him. “No pun intended, but I figure all hell would break loose.”

“And there will also be hell to pay.”

“I don’t have any beef with you.”

“I know that.”

Jim turned to Kali and the Korean. “I also have no problem with either of you.”

Lucifer took another drag on his cigar. “I still can’t allow you to put a bullet in Dick here.”

“You can’t stop me from pulling the trigger.”

“I can make you wish that you hadn’t.”

“Suppose I were to take his money?”

“You want to rob Lucifer’s poker game? You’ve got a lot of gall, kid.”

“I don’t want to rob you, or Kali, or the Korean gentleman.”

Nixon looked at Lucifer. “You’re going to let this happen?”

Lucifer nodded. “You’re on your own from here on out.”

“I thought we had a deal.”

“We had a deal when you were alive to make you president, and you’ve got a deal now to rebuild your place in history, but I sure as shit don’t recall guaranteeing to protect you from any hothead who wants to rip off your poker stake.”

Jim pointed the Gun That Belonged to Elvis at Nixon’s head. “Fork over the cash, you sorry son of a bitch.”

After a short reluctant pause, Nixon pushed the coins across the table. Jim gestured with the gun. “And the rest.”

“What rest?”

“Are you telling me you don’t have a little slush fund stashed away?”

With sullen reluctance, Nixon reached under his blue suit coat, pulled out a small leather bag, and tossed it on the table. “You’ll pay for this. You know that, don’t you?”

Jim’s lip curled. “Sure, I don’t doubt it. I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my days.” He gestured to Doc. “You’re coming with us, right?”

Doc smiled. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

Jim shook his head and Doc looked around at the other players. “I hate to leave you all while I’m still ahead, but I’ve always made a point of never arguing with a man with a gun.”

***

“That was a pretty spectacular diversion.”

“Actually a lot of it was strictly personal. I didn’t know Nixon was going to be there. Did he really make a deal with Lucifer to be president?”

“More deals are made with Lucifer than you might ever suspect.”

“Did you ever make one?”

Doc coughed. “Believe me, if I’d cut a deal with the devil, I’d be a lot better off than I am now.”

Jim, Doc, and Semple rode down in the elevator. The two men seemed pumped, almost as if they were enjoying this adventure, but Semple wasn’t quite able to share their excitement. “Having made your big grandstand play, have either of you considered what we’re going to do next?”

Doc looked at Jim. “You don’t have a plan?”

“What do you mean, a plan? This has all been played strictly by ear.”

“Are you telling me you don’t have a way out of here set up?”

Jim started to look angry. “Wait a damned minute-”

Semple interrupted before Jim and Doc could embark on some absurd male argument. “All Danbhala La Flambeau told us was to get you out of that suicidal poker game.”

“La Flambeau? Where the fuck did she come into all this?”

As briefly as she could, Semple explained her and Jim’s encounters with the Voodoo gods and what had transpired on the island. When she’d finished, Doc slowly shook his head. “I can’t leave you alone for a moment, can I?”

Jim was still looking marginally belligerent. “Listen, if Hypodermic gives me the full softening-up treatment, and then La Flambeau and Marie-Louise say jump, I just ask how high.”

Doc’s mouth slowly opened. “Marie-Louise is involved in this?”

Jim nodded. Doc shook his head. “Do you know how deep you’ve got us in?” He sighed. “And do you know how long I’ve waited to get back in a poker game with Lucifer? And now I’m almost certainly persona non grata in all the casinos of Hell.”

Semple never could figure men’s lack of logic, and she certainly couldn’t believe that Doc was complaining about being rescued. “You would have come out of the game a brainless cabbage and you know it.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

Before Doc could explain what the point actually was, the elevator doors opened and the three of them stepped out.

***

Aimee could hear the breakaway nuns chanting somewhere behind the large cloister. Bemadette’s voice rose above the general chorus in a strange wailing counterpoint. The language was one that Aimee didn’t recognize. A weird glossalia, a unison speaking-intongues, as though some dangerous spirit were upon them. Aimee knew that they had to be psyching themselves up, building up a head of righteous rage before they finally came to finish her. The handful of sisters and angels who had remained loyal looked on as she knelt in the Sacristy. She pretended to be praying, but all she was really doing was sobbing to herself.

“Oh my God, Semple, what have I done? If you were here, you’d know what to do. Except you’re not here. You’re fragmented in Limbo and very soon they’re going to come for me. They’re going to come for me and take me to Golgotha. I didn’t mean to do what I did. I was just angry. You can’t blame me for being angry, after all the terrible things that happened. I’d make it just like it was before if I knew how, but I don’t. Since I destroyed you, I haven’t been able to make anything.”

Aimee would have prayed, had there been any point, and had there been anyone to listen to her prayers, but she knew there was no one. God had deserted her-or had never existed in the first place-and Jesus, after the briefest of honeymoons, had turned out to be a homicidal pervert. Never, either in life or Afterlife, had she felt so powerless and alone. As she knelt and sobbed, one of the loyal nuns tentatively approached her. “Sister Aimee?”

Aimee took a deep breath and got exhaustedly to her feet. “What is it, my dear?”

“Do Bernadette and her women intend to hurt us?”

Aimee didn’t answer right away. She knew that if Bernadette and her mutineers could break into the area of Heaven where she and the loyalists were holed up, they would almost certainly drag all of them out and crucify them. Bernadette had started calling herself the Hammer of God, and anyone who adopted such a title was unlikely to be interested in any kind of truce or accommodation. Whether the few nuns that had remained loyal needed to know the worst was a moot point. Aimee didn’t want to deceive them, but at the same time, if they knew how hopeless their situation was, they, too, would probably desert her. Aimee closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I really don’t think they mean us any good. They are very angry women.”

“It wasn’t your fault that Jesus did what he did.”

“They don’t seem to see it that way.”

Another nun joined the first one. “If there was a way for us to get some weapons, perhaps we could drive them off. Show them we mean business.”

Nuns talking about weapons came as something of a surprise to Aimee. “But this is Heaven. We never had a need for weapons.”

Now a third nun came into the discussion. “We heard that Bernadette and her people have a lot of weapons. We heard that she managed to conjure them.”

Perhaps the idea of these nuns wanting weapons wasn’t so farfetched as it seemed. They might have taken holy orders, but, prior to that at least three of them had flat-backed it in Doc Holliday’s disgusting brothel. Perhaps they still had a fighting core at the center of their being. The trouble was Aimee had no experience in conjuring things like weapons. In fact, since she’d destroyed Semple, she was finding it nearly impossible to hold Heaven itself together. Large circular Swiss-cheese holes had appeared in some of the buildings, giving the landscape the air of a surrealist painting.

“Couldn’t you conjure us some weapons? Maybe some light machine guns? We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, just scare them off.”

Aimee looked at the nuns with an expression of terminal sadness. “I don’t know if I’m able to do anything like that. I have no experience. I’ve always been a pacifist.”

“What about Semple? Maybe she could help us.”

Aimee hadn’t exactly explained to the nuns and angels what had become of Semple. All they knew was that she’d left after Jesus was crucified. They certainly didn’t know that Aimee had blasted her into Limbo, and she wasn’t about to reveal that now. Aside from the fact that it would blow her image as the Princess of Peace and the helpless victim of Bernadette and her renegades, some of the loyalists might start asking why she couldn’t set up a similar vibration and blow Bernadette and her cohorts way into the back of beyond. “I don’t think Semple’s going to be coming back here for a very long time. She feels very guilty about bringing the false Jesus here.”

One of the angels rustled his wings. “Maybe if we went to Semple’s domain? She could have weapons there. And there are those strange guards that she invented. Perhaps they might protect us.”

Aimee was about to explain why retreating to Semple’s horrible environment was out of the question, but then it occurred to her that the angel might actually have had an inspired idea.

***

As Jim, Doc, and Semple emerged from the elevator, the woman in the elaborate buckled boots was coming out of the coffee shop. Semple nodded to her but received only a blank stare in response. The two men were still debating the best way to get out of Hell, and neither of them noticed the woman at all as they headed for the revolving doors of the Mephisto Hotel’s main entrance. The entrance led out into a broad tunnel that in turn would take them to the concourse at the foot of the elevators. Directly outside the doors, a small knot of Virgils were plying for hire. Jim glanced at Doc. “Do you think we should get one?”

Doc thought about this. “I don’t know Hell well enough to get around without some sort of guide, but it’s taking a chance. Word could go straight back to Lucifer.”

Semple looked around cautiously. “You think Lucifer will be coming after us?”

“Indeed I do. Kali, too, for that matter. Young Morrison here may not have actually taken their money, but he did rob the game, and that’s something neither of them can allow to be seen to happen.”

“So it’s really just my ass that’s on the line ?”

Doc shook his head. “I fear Lucifer and Kali don’t go in for such precise apportionment of blame. We were all there, we all left together-we’re all tarred with the same brush.”

“So it wouldn’t help if we separated?”

Doc half-smiled. “A noble thought, my boy, but it wouldn’t do any good.” He glanced slyly at Semple. “Besides, I thought you two were in the throes of lewd acquaintance.”

Jim glanced at Semple and then turned back to Doc. “What’s the point in getting acquainted if I’ll only end up dragging her down with me ?”

Semple stiffened. “Listen, darling, before you start trying to do any far, far better thing, let me decide when and where I want to be dragged down.”

Before the subject of Jim taking the rap could continue, a Virgil came up to them and bowed with studied if importunate courtesy. “Lady and gentlemen, you seem a little lost. Can I be of any service?”

Before either Jim or Doc could respond, Semple took the bull by the horns. “We have to find the fastest way out of here without anyone knowing about it.”

“We Virgils act only in the strictest confidence.”

“Yeah, right. Of course.” Jim didn’t exactly seem convinced.

The Virgil looked almost offended. “No, no, young sir. I assure you. We could hardly function if our discretion was held in any doubt. This is Hell, after all. Many who need a guide do not want their purpose or destination made public.”

Jim looked inquiringly at Doc. “Do we trust him?”

“I think we have to. I don’t have a clue where we should go.”

He faced the Virgil. “So, altissimo poeta, do you think you can get us out of the city without being seen or intercepted?”

“That may well be up to you, young sir.”

Jim stared at the Virgil with deep suspicion. “And what is that supposed to mean, altissimo poeta?”

The Virgil’s face was a mask of formality, impossible to read. “The ancient ways, the ones that are seldom used any longer, these are the paths to take if you need to leave here undetected.”

Doc’s eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting we ride the Dragon, altissimo poeta?”

***

Bernadette and her renegades had stopped chanting, and Aimee knew she had to assume they were on their way to the Sacristy. She looked around at the assembled nuns and angels. “I think it’s time we joined hands. I hate to abandon the Heaven we’ve all worked so hard to create, but the angel here does have the only practical suggestion. We must seek refuge in Semple’s domain.”

What Aimee wasn’t admitting to her small band of followers was that she wasn’t at all sure Semple’s domain was still actually there. It might have imploded when she’d blown Semple into Limbo. If the little group wind-walked to a place that wasn’t there, they would find themselves randomly consigned to absolutely anywhere. They could easily end up, either individually or as a group, in a place that was completely uninhabitable, airless, burning hot or freezing cold, or filled with ravening predators. Despite this, Aimee had already conceded that it would probably be better than crucifixion and whatever Bernadette, in her new role as the Hammer of God, might decide to inflict on them before they were actually nailed to their respective crosses. Aimee suspected that Bernadette was entertaining dreams of inquisition and auto-da-fe. To return to the pods was one thing; prolonged torture was entirely another.

The group linked hands and the energy began to flow. Although they were only eight in number and were badly depleted by recent events, Aimee knew they should be able to raise the power to lift out of there. She focused all her concentration on what she remembered from her single visit to Semple’s territory, and hoped against hope that a destination would still exist when they arrived. As they waited to dematerialize, any question of turning back or revising the plan was eliminated. Bemadette’s rebels began battering on the Sacristy’s carved oak door. The door was formidable, but it would only be a matter of time before they broke it down.

***

The attack came out of nowhere. One moment Semple, Doc, Jim, and the Virgil had been walking quietly through one of the larger passages in the maze of dank subterranean avenues that made up the greater part of Hell’s Third Circle. This fairly deserted thoroughfare of cobbles, paths, and dripping stones-a habitat for grotesque creeping things and misshapen growths of fungi-was an ideal place for an ambush, but they were being reasonably vigilant, and certainly not loitering. The next moment Semple let out a low gurgle and was suddenly dragged backward. The section of passage through which they were traveling wasn’t particularly well lighted, with only ancient, hissing Jack-the-Ripper gaslights every thirty feet, and it took Jim and Doc a couple of seconds to grasp exactly what had happened. A dark figure had slipped out of a doorway, tossed a knotted white scarf around Semple’s neck, and dragged her backward, strangling her. Jim, who was nearest to Semple, had already returned the Gun That Belonged to Elvis to Doc, but even if he’d still had the piece, it wouldn’t have done him very much good. The black-clad attacker was not only throttling Semple, but using her as a shield while he did so. Doc pulled the gun, but from where he was standing, Jim and the Virgil stood in the way of a clear shot.

Jim saw that he was Semple’s only chance. Without thinking, he lunged forward, fists swinging. More by luck than judgment, he connected with the dark shape and heard a muttered curse. He punched twice more and connected again. The attacker let go of one end of the scarf and pushed Semple hard into Jim. As Semple dropped to her knees, coughing and choking, Jim stepped around her and lashed out with his foot, attempting to trip the assassin as he turned to flee. Jim had never exactly been a brawler, but some kind of street-fighting good fortune seemed to be with him there in the Third Circle. His kick swept the attacker’s feet out from under him and he fell heavily on the cobblestones. Jim dropped on top of him, pinning his arms. The attacker still had his legs free, however, and attempted to break loose from Jim by bucking and kicking. In two paces, though, Doc was by Jim’s side, pistol in hand, pointing it at the attacker’s head.

“Keep still, you son of a bitch, or I’ll put a gold .45 slug clear through your damned brain.”

At least the assassin had enough common sense to know a fait accompli when he saw one and he stopped struggling. As Jim pushed himself off, he was surprised to find his hands making contact with a full breast and a narrow waist. “Holy shit, it’s a woman!”

Doc pushed him out of the way. Now that they were able to see a little better, Jim’s tactile discovery was a little more obvious. It was indeed a woman-a very good-looking young woman-dressed in a black cape and a kind of one-piece ninja leotard. Her face was hidden behind a black bandanna, and she was wearing an extremely elaborate pair of boots with dozens of tiny buckles. As Jim straightened up, Doc leaned down and pulled away the bandanna. The face that was revealed had dark coffee-colored skin, large angry eyes and a red caste mark exactly in the middle of the forehead. Doc whistled under his breath. “A thugette.”

“A what?”

“A thugette, one of Kali’s killer virgins. The distaff version of the thugee.”

“You mean like in Stranglers of Bombay?”

Doc nodded. “Right, if you must equate everything with some low-budget movie to get a handle on it. They kill for the goddess with the knotted scarf.”

The Virgil was helping a coughing Semple, who, despite the obvious discomfort of a nearly crushed windpipe, moved quickly to where Doc and Jim were standing over the prone assassin. Picking up the knotted scarf on the way, she took one look at the buckled boots and went whiter than she already was. “Goddamn it. I saw that homicidal bitch in the coffee shop at the Mephisto. We sat at the same table. I even spoke to her.”

Doc glanced up and down the street. “She must have been one of Kali’s minders, waiting for her mistress to get out of Lucifer’s poker game. I guess she’s been following us ever since we left the hotel.”

Semple frowned. “The question is, what do we do with her now? We can’t let her go and report back.”

She glanced significantly at the gun in Doc’s hand, but Doc shook his head. “I can’t shoot a woman in cold blood.”

Semple glared at him. “Why the fuck not? She tried to waste me, didn’t she?”

Suddenly the women spasmed briefly, gasped out a choking gurgle, stiffened, and then went limp. Doc quickly knelt down beside her and felt the side of her neck for a pulse. “She’s solved the problem for us.”

“She’s left for the pods?”

“Or wherever her kind go. She must have had a cyanide tooth.”

By this point, the Virgil had also joined them and he looked very unhappy. “Good sirs and lady, did I overhear you correctly? Is it Lucifer and Kali from whom you flee?”

Doc nodded grimly. “I fear it is, altissimo poeta.”

“Then I must respectfully terminate our agreement. I am a Virgil and it is implicitly understood that I leave at the first sign of danger.” He gestured to the thugette’s inert body. “And that is a more than contractually adequate first sign.”

Doc gestured with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. “I’m sorry, altissimo poeta, but we are going to have to impose on you over and above the terms of any implied agreement. You will lead us to the start of the Dragon Ride, or I will, with the greatest regret, send you after this young woman here.”

The Virgil looked at Jim and Semple, but they gave him no sign that they were in anything but total agreement with Doc. “I must protest this, good sir. I will lead you, but this is no way to treat a Virgil.”

Doc lowered the pistol to his side, but didn’t return it to its holster. “Your protest is noted, altissimo poeta.”

***

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m the only one left, aren’t I?”

The very last thing Mr. Thomas needed was the sudden appearance of Aimee McPherson, five nuns, and two angels right in the Louis XVI Suite of Semple’s domain. Since Aimee had totaled her sister, the environment had been shaken by what he could only think of as a series of violent earth tremors, bringing down plaster and mosaic tiles from the ceilings, shaking objects from shelves, causing paintings and artworks to come crashing down, and creating jagged structural cracks in the floors and walls. He knew the earth tremors weren’t truly seismic disturbances. They were a symptom that Semple, as the Afterlife knew her, was history, and her environment would progressively collapse as her residual energy dissipated and ebbed away to chaos and entropy. What would become of him when that happened was highly debatable. In the aftermath of Aimee’s trashing of Semple, he had managed to slip away and windwalk back to the domain under his own power. That, unfortunately, was about as far as he was able to make it unaided, and without help he wasn’t going any farther.

Right then, though, Mr. Thomas hadn’t been thinking too much about the future. While Semple’s real estate remained more or less real, he had resolved to get drunk and stay drunk. To this end he had formed an alliance with Igor, who had discovered that the wine cellar and liquor cache had remained pretty much intact through the upheavals. The only unfortunate part was that Igor showed absolutely no inclination to leave. His fealty to Semple was such that he wanted nothing more than to go down with the sinking illusion. Mr. Thomas hoped that, as the place started to come more unglued, the Peter Lorre–looking butler might reexamine his devotion to a woman who was long gone; perhaps the two of them would join forces and attempt to get away. In the meantime, the goat had resolved to let the martinis flow and face the hangover when it came.

In Mr. Thomas’s opinion, Aimee McPherson, with her crew of nuns and angels, pretty much qualified as an early and unwanted hangover. He couldn’t imagine why they should come bursting in, but he knew he was going have to deal with it, and since Igor seemed to have pulled a vanishing act, he was going to have to deal with it on his own. His first tactic was to go for open hostility. He might be a little unsteady on his four legs, on account of how recently he’d forsworn glasses and taken to drinking his martinis from a galvanized bucket, but he had a full head of resentment to use as fuel. He planted himself squarely in front of the blond McPherson sister and looked her up and down with as much Welsh contempt as he could muster. “So what’s the big idea, toots? You come here with a team to loot out your sister’s domain before it falls apart?”

One of the nuns advanced angrily on him. “How dare you talk to our Holy Shepherdess like that? You can’t address the Lady Aimee as ‘toots.’ ”

Aimee motioned the nuns back. “Leave him be. He’s probably upset.”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “Damn right I’m upset. And I’m also shit-faced drunk. Ever since I fell in with you McPherson sisters, it’s been nothing but trouble, but right now we’re not talking about me. You still haven’t explained why you’re here.”

“We came here looking for a sanctuary.”

“A sanctuary? Don’t make me laugh. There’s no sanctuary here. The place is on the verge of coming apart. You might as well look for refuge in the House of Usher.”

“The other nuns-”

“Turned on you, did they, now?”

Aimee was still spent from the wind-walk out of Heaven, coming as it did on top of the huge amount of energy she had expended on Semple. Explaining herself to a goat was more unnecessary effort than she really cared to squander. “The militant one, Bernadette, she’s started calling herself the Hammer of God.”

“So you thought you’d hide here from her and her gang?”

“We didn’t know what else to do.”

“Didn’t occur to you that this might be the first place she’d come looking?”

“It was the only thing we could do.”

“So now I’m going to wind up sharing whatever nails this Hammer of God wants to drive into you and yours?”

Aimee started to get angry. “Don’t you think of anything but your own miserable self?”

Mr. Thomas drew back his goat lips in a mirthless sneer. “Lately, I seem to be all I’ve got.”

A sudden wheezing sound behind him told Mr. Thomas he was no longer facing Aimee and her nuns and angels alone. Three of Semple’s rubber guards tottered slowly into the reproduction of Versailles, moving like a trio of Frankenstein monsters in a cheap Universal horror movie, and breathing like Darth Vader. Since Semple’s departure the rubber guards had become increasing slow and cumbersome, but it seemed that they could still make an entrance. Ignoring Mr. Thomas, they lumbered toward Aimee and her people, with the leader issuing his formal challenge in a voice like a slowed-down phonograph record. “You-are-unauthorized-intruders. You-will-remain-exactly-where-you-are-or-we-will-open-fire.”

The rubber guards may have been slow, but they still had their weapons, and these were pointed directly at Aimee, the nuns, and the angels. Aimee looked quickly at Mr. Thomas. “Can’t you call them off or something?”

Mr. Thomas shook his head. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now that Semple’s no longer with us, the only person they respond to is Igor and he’s hiding somewhere.”

Aimee’s nuns were looking increasingly confused. “What does he mean, now that Semple’s gone?”

Aimee rounded on her angrily. “Shut up, you stupid bitch. This isn’t the time.”

Mr. Thomas laughed drunkenly. “You mean you haven’t told them what you did to your poor little sister?”

Aimee turned and snarled at the goat, “If I had a weapon . . .”

“But you don’t, do you, Aimee?”

Before Aimee could formulate a comeback, the rubber guard leader started with the second phase of his warning. “You-are-unauthorizedintruders. You-have-twenty-relative-seconds-to-remove-yourselvesfrom-this-environment-or-suffer-the-consequences.”

Aimee looked distraughtly from the rubber guard to Mr. Thomas and back again. “Can’t you get Igor and make him call them off?”

The goat shook his head. “Not unless Igor wants to be got. I fear it may be the pods for you, Holy Shepherdess.”

***

“Is the Dragon Ride what I think it is?”

The Virgil avoided Jim’s eyes. He, Jim, Semple, and Doc were hurrying along a dim, narrow, rarely used passageway, another thoroughfare in Hell where the stalactites had completely taken over the ceiling and moss and algae grew on the damp walls. The Virgil was clearly more concerned about Doc Holliday, who still had the Gun That Belonged to Elvis hidden at his side, than he was with Jim’s questions. “It is one of the oldest and least used ways out of here.”

“And it’ll supply the energy to move us?”

The Virgil nodded. “It will do that.”

“But there are problems?”

“There are certain . . . ” The Virgil glanced uneasily at Doc, as though worried he might shoot him should he deliver any bad news.

Doc attempted to allay the Virgil’s fear. “Certain what, altissimo poeta?”

“What you might call . . . side effects, good sir. I have never personally ridden the Dragon, so I cannot speak from experience, but I have it on good authority that one needs to concentrate very hard on one’s destination, and, even then, certain distracting illusions may present themselves.”

Jim didn’t like the sound of this. “Distracting illusions?”

“As I said, I have never taken the Dragon Ride, young sir. Indeed, it is only the Virgils and a few others who even know of its existence.”

Semple cut straight to the heart of the matter. “But it will get us out of Hell?”

“It will do that, madame.”

“Then that’s all we need to know for the moment.”

It wasn’t quite enough for Jim. “If we have to focus on a destination, it might be an idea to have some destination in mind. Simply wanting to get out of Hell covers a whole mess of territory, and I, for one, have been shuttling between fires and frying pans a bit too much recently.”

Semple wasn’t in the least fazed by the question. “The obvious answer would be for us to all go to my domain.”

Doc sniffed. “All back to your place?”

“You have a problem with that?”

Doc shook his head. “No problem. I was just wondering if you still had a place to go back to. How do you know it’s still intact, after your sister blew you off into Limbo?”

“It’s there. I built it and I can still sense it. It’s a bit battered around the edges, but it’s still there. You can trust me on that.”

Doc looked a trifle squint-eyed, as though trusting Semple’s feeling was hardly the guarantee he wanted. “I’m supposed to kick off on the Dragon Ride on the say-so of a woman I’ve only just met?”

Jim quickly intervened. “Give her a break, Doc. I’ll take her word for it. I think maybe I love this woman.”

Now Semple was looking squint-eyed. “You think maybe you love me? After spending days and days having every kind of sex known to man, woman, god, or beast, you think maybe you love me?”

Before Jim could come up with an answer, Virgil interrupted. “Sirs, madame, could we please move along? I know I have to accomplish this task, but I’d prefer to discharge it as quickly as possible.”

With the precision timing of extremely bad luck, Jim could hear running footsteps way down the tunnel, just as the Virgil finished speaking.

***

Three factors that Mr. Thomas would later consider dubiously serendipitous were all that saved Aimee and her angels from a summary dispatch to the Great Double Helix. The first was the slowdown in the rubber guards’ responses since Semple had departed. The guards’ twenty-second deadline extended itself to well over two minutes; then, just before even that ran out, the second factor staggered into the room in the form of Igor. Igor hadn’t been drinking his martinis from a bucket, but he was nonetheless just as far in the bag as Mr. Thomas, so drunk that he found it difficult to grasp what was happening.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“I think you turned up just in time to see the firing squad in action.”

Just then, Mr. Thomas didn’t particularly care what happened. He still had a major grudge against Aimee for what she had done to Semple, whom he considered not only a friend but also a drinking companion. If the rubber guards wanted to execute her and her ridiculous cohorts, so be it. At least he’d be left in peace. It was only as the rubber guards raised their guns and trained them on Aimee and her cowering followers that Igor blinked twice and finally made sense of the situation. “Wait a minute.”

The rubber guards ground to a stop without firing their weapons. Mr. Thomas looked blearily at Igor. “Why did you stop them?”

“I can’t have the guards shooting the mistress’s sister. That would never do.”

“But she’s the reason your precious mistress isn’t here anymore.”

Igor swayed. “Blood is thicker than water.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Igor shook his head as though trying to clear it. “I’m not quite sure.”

Mr. Thomas turned and faced Igor. “Listen to me, okay?”

Igor nodded, but looked exceedingly vacant. “Okay.”

“These people are only here because a bunch of armed rebel nuns is after them.”

Now that Igor was very drunk, his resemblance to Peter Lorre, in both appearance and voice, was quite uncanny. “Armed rebel nuns?”

“That’s right.”

The rubber guards stood poised, as though waiting for a fresh set of instructions. Mr. Thomas moved confidingly toward Igor. “I have much more experience in this sort of thing.”

Igor frowned. “What sort of thing?”

“Acting decisively when very drunk.”

“When I’m drunk, I can’t feel the noise inside other people’s minds. That’s why a lot of telepaths are alcoholics. They can’t take the constant noise.”

Mr. Thomas was being very patient with Igor. He could see that Aimee, the nuns, and the angels were rapidly getting over their fear of the rubber guards. Aimee even took a tentative step forward, but this was enough to set the guards in motion again. “Do-not-move. Remain-where-you-are-while-we-await-our-orders.”

Aimee couldn’t believe that the very continuance of her existence was in the hands of a goat and a semi-dwarf, both mindlessly gin-drunk. She tried a direct appeal. “Igor-”

Mr. Thomas shook his head warningly. “Don’t listen to her, Igor.”

Igor was now totally confused. “What should I do, Mr. Thomas?”

“I think you should order the guards to shoot them, Igor. Then, when the really mean and nasty nuns break in, we can claim that we’re on their side. Otherwise we’ll end up crucified right along with this lot.”

“I don’t want to be crucified, Mr. Thomas.”

“Of course you don’t, bach, so give the order to fire.”

But before Igor could give the order to fire, the third factor that saved Aimee came into play. A loud crash in another section of the environment was followed by a shock and a bang as though a grenade or a charge of explosive had gone off. The rubber guards were galvanized into slow-motion action by this new intrusion, which they saw as more pressingly dangerous than the intrusion of Aimee and her group.

“Emergency-emergency! Armed intruders in the Moorish colonnade! All-guards-respond! Armed intruders in the Moorish colonnade! All-guards-respond! All-guards-respond!”

This call to the guards appeared to countermand all previous programmed imperatives. Aimee and her people were forgotten as more formidable interlopers threatened. As the three rubber guards trundled from the Louis XVI Suite, Aimee smiled nastily. “So, goat, Igor left it too late, didn’t he? Now we sink or swim together.”

***

The pursuers emerged from the tunnel that Jim, Semple, and the Virgil had just left and immediately opened fire. As the first bullets ricocheted from the stone of the carved Dragon, all ducked for cover. The Virgil looked anxiously at Jim. “I can’t be expected to involve myself in this.”

Jim was busy ducking bullets; he was hardly able to pay attention to their guide and his troubles. “I don’t much want to be involved in it myself.”

“But this is your problem, not mine.”

A fragment of lead or stone all but parted Jim’s hair. “Can you get yourself out of here?”

“I’d be more than happy to.”

Jim quickly reached inside his coat and pulled out the bag of coins he had taken from Richard Nixon. He tossed it in the Virgil’s direction. The Virgil deftly caught the bag, hefted it to feel the weight, and treated Jim to a brief formal smile. “I thank you for your generosity, young sir. And now I must bid you farewell. I’m sorry I can’t stay to observe the outcome of this.”

The Virgil made a complex pass with his right hand and instantly vanished. Jim blinked and glanced at Doc. “How the fuck did he manage that?”

Doc was crouched behind the Dragon’s other extended foreleg. He shook his head. “Don’t ask me, boy. I guess the Virgils have their secrets.”

With the Gun That Belonged to Elvis in his hand, Doc was taking aim at the shadowy figures and muzzle flashes on the other side of the cavern. He fired three fast shots that exploded where they hit in highly destructive puffs of ghost plasma. A scream indicated that at least one of his projectiles had hit its mark, but Doc’s return fire also triggered another intense volley from the hidden pursuers. Jim ducked lower, seeking every inch of cover. “I wish we had that trick.”

Doc fired again. “Unfortunately, we don’t. Our only hope is to get ourselves into the Dragon’s mouth and away. Can you and Miss McPherson make it in there if I give you covering fire?”

“We don’t have any other choice, do we?”

“Not that I can see.”

“What about you? We only have the one weapon.”

Doc allowed himself a deadly grin. “Don’t worry about me, boy. If I can’t hold these clowns at bay, I don’t deserve to make it at all.”

“Surely they’ll just follow us inside.”

“I’m hoping, once we’re inside, we’ll be able to wind our way out almost immediately.”

“I sure as shit hope so, too.”

“Are you ready?”

Jim glanced at Semple to confirm she knew what the plan was. She nodded tensely and Jim looked back at Doc. “We’re ready.”

“Then go for it!”

As Doc laid down a positive fusillade of fire and the dim cavern was lit up by more flashes of plasma, Jim and Semple scrambled for the open archway formed by the mouth of the huge Dragon statue, bullets kicking up fragments of stone around their feet. The moment they were inside the dark sculpted maw, they turned to see if Doc was going to make it. With the same nonchalant lack of concern for his own safety that had made him a legend in the Old West, Doc rose to his feet. Two of the pursuers broke cover, a zoot-suited vato armed with a sacred Thompson gun and a thugee in dirty robes with a nineteenth century Martini carbine. Both ran toward Doc. Apparently they assumed that Doc was surrendering. They learned their mistake as Doc, still without hurrying himself, took aim and reduced them to dissipating plasma with just two shots. The disappearance of their two companions gave sufficient pause to the other pursuers that he was able to stroll calmly after Jim and Semple and into the mouth of the Dragon. As he approached them, he looked extremely pleased with himself. “Shall we get on with getting out of here?”

When the vato and the thugee came out into the open, it was the first time that Semple, Doc, or Jim had seen the people who had been following them. Until that moment Jim had been entertaining a paranoid flight of fantasy that the footsteps were nothing more than an audio illusion sent to drive the three of them crazy, and that maybe the Virgil was also in on the deal, leading them around and around in circles until they finally cracked. Real or not, the audible footfalls of the pursuers had dogged them, through tunnels and passageways, all the way into what had to be one of the most ancient sectors of Hell, an area that was dark, derelict, all but deserted, and largely forgotten by a population now occupied with well-lit tourist attractions. Unfortunately, the sector hadn’t been forgotten by the relentlessly following footsteps.

The Virgil had done his best to shake the unseen posse by making use of every twist, turn, and doubling-back corkscrew he could dredge up from his encyclopedic memory of Hell’s geographic backwaters. They had used tunnels so small that even Semple had to duck her head to pass through them. They had rounded hairpins, climbed and descended narrow spiral staircases, and crossed fragile bridges over abyssal chasms with red molten lava flowing in their depths. On several occasions the sound of the pursuit had faded to nothing, but no sooner had Doc, Jim, and Semple breathed a collective sigh of relief than the advancing echoes had started up again and they were forced to hurry on.

The long trek through Hell’s labyrinth ended in a high, roughhewn cavern where, in its ancient but unweathered glory, stood a massively heraldic, couchant Dragon, carved from living rock aeons earlier by some unknown demon sculptor. Beyond its gasping, stone-fanged mouth lay the mysterious power source that would, according to fable, transport them out of Hell and, within reason, take them anywhere they wanted to go. Unfortunately, when they had reached the cavern, their pursers had finally caught up with them and the firefight had ensued.

Even once they were inside the mouth of the dragon, the mystery of the Dragon Ride itself was far from revealed. They found themselves in the darkness of yet another tunnel. The only light came from a dull red glow deep in the interior. Nothing about this place encouraged either Jim or Semple to press on into the gloomy unknown, but they knew they had to. The crew sent after them by Lucifer and Kali was not going to call off the chase just because Doc had gunned down two of their number. If anything, it would probably make them even more vengeful. While Jim and Semple initially stood and stared, attempting to make sense of their new surroundings, Doc moved purposefully forward. “Come on, young lovers, we’re not out of the woods yet.”

“It’s seems like we’re going in deeper and deeper.” Semple fell into step beside him while Jim hurriedly brought up the rear. Doc glanced back, but there was no sign of the pursuers-not yet.

“I think we have to operate on the principle that it’s going to get pretty damned dark before the dawn comes.”

“Or maybe we’re just whistling past the graveyard?”

Doc treated Jim to a bleak look. “Just don’t whistle, okay? I wouldn’t want to listen to it.”

As they moved quickly down the tunnel, the red light grew brighter; along with it came an intense sense of foreboding. The end of the tunnel brought no end to the apprehension. When it opened out onto a high ledge above a vast lake of liquid fire, Jim and Semple both stopped in their tracks, though they knew their pursuers had to be only minutes behind them.

“How the fuck is any of this going to help us get out of here?”

Doc pointed to something far along the ledge. “I think that may be the answer.”

“What?”

“That.”

Semple peered into the distance, shading her eyes against the glare from the burning lake. “Are you talking about that bridge?”

“You see anything else that could work?”

“But that bridge isn’t complete; it looks like they never finished it. It only goes halfway across the lake.”

“And we have to cross it.”

Semple halted and planted her hands on her hips. “Are you out of your mind, Doc Holliday? What happens when the bridge stops?”

“We keep on going.”

“And fall into the lake of fire?”

“Hopefully we go on and up and out. The end of the tangible bridge being the jumping point for the wind-walk.”

“Hopefully?”

Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes. The heat from the burning lake was causing him to break out in a sweat. “We just have to take it on trust. Doc’s right, there’s no other way.”

But Semple was digging in. Jim hadn’t known her that long, and most of that knowledge was carnal, but he was already starting to recognize her capacity for resolute stubbornness. She was quite prepared to face down Doc Holliday if need be. “I bow to the fact that you’ve been around the Afterlife far longer than either me or Jim, but I’ve crossed a few bridges in my time and I’m pretty well versed in their symbolic content. I have to assume that a bridge that only goes halfway is exactly what it claims to be, a dead end. With the accent on dead.”

Doc gave her a hard look. “I wouldn’t spend too long bowing to my experience. I can hear the bad guys coming down the tunnel.”

With no other alternative, they scrambled along the ledge toward the elegant stone arch of the ambiguous half bridge. Semple shook her head even as she ran. “I still think we’re doing the wrong thing.”

They were almost to the bridge when the pursuers came out of the tunnel. Bullets peppered the rock walls above the ledge, but none came close enough to be a threat. The posse was shooting on the run, more as matter of brute psychology than out of any serious intent to do harm. In no time they would catch up with Jim, Semple, and Doc, and the fugitives would be in the bag. Doc didn’t even bother to fire back. In four more paces, he was on the bridge. Jim was immediately behind him. For a moment Semple balked, then two more shots hit the rock wall and she started forward again. “Damn you both. This is insane.”

“You want to fall into the clutches of Kali?”

“I don’t want to fall into the burning lake.”

“Trust that you won’t fall.”

“I can’t just walk off into empty air like Daffy Duck.”

Jim and Doc held out their hands. “We’ll do it together.”

Semple grasped their hands. With Jim and Doc on the outside, and her in the middle, the three of them stepped into nothingness, with only the lake of fire beneath them. In the last second, Doc laughed out loud. “Entering the Dragon Ride-if the damn thing exists!”