Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

How easy to survive?

What has happened to my creation?”

Anger and alarm were Semple’s first response as she grew to human form out of the rolling swirls of orange Day-Glo mist in which she, Doc Holliday, and Jim Morrison had made their vaporous, billowing reentry from the Dragon Ride. She sprang to her feet before Jim and Doc were even fully formed and looked around furiously at the ruins of her onetime kingdom, as yet unaware that she was jaybird-naked. “I thought there’d be damage, but never anything like this.”

Jim was now also fully formed and he, too, had come through without a stitch of clothing. Doc, on the other hand, was clothed and correct-except, mysteriously, for his boots, each now on the wrong foot. As he irritatably tugged his left boot from his right foot, he glanced at the nude and bemused Jim. “Were you two having sex in the middle of all that?”

Jim looked at Doc and blinked sheepishly. “What makes you say that?”

“I heard some sounds just as we were being transformed into fog.”

Semple turned and glared at Doc. “Then you should have been minding your own business, shouldn’t you?” Her clothes were now assembling around her out of thin air. Not the red dress she had worn in Hell, but a midnight-blue, semi-military ensemble with a pencil skirt, padded shoulders, and epaulets that matched her current belligerent mood. Now that she was back home, Semple seemed to be building up a head of rage at everything around her. Jim’s time-honored leather jeans and loose shirt also appeared; only the white tuxedo jacket he’d been given at the casino had vanished along the way. The three of them had arrived in the same mosque-like chamber with the high-domed ceiling, black marble floor, and ruby glass where Semple had once amused herself by torturing her prisoners and slaves.

In some ways, it was an apt reentry point, although right at that moment Semple was too angry to see it as such. Her blood was boiling at the ravages to which her glorious construct had been subjected. The marble was cracked and shattered, and part of the dome had fallen in, littering the already-damaged floor with rubble, smashed mosaics, and broken beams. The air was filled with dust, smoke, and the stench of cordite, indicating that some of the damage had been caused by indoor explosions since Semple’s departure. The gaping hole in the dome now let in an eerie, green-death light that had never been any part of her original design. Breathing hard, she repeated her question as though expecting someone or something to provide her with an answer. “What have they done to my beautiful home?”

The sounds of automatic weapons fire and a muffled explosion from another part of the environment supplied an answer of a sort. Doc finished switching his boots and warily eased to his feet, at the same time drawing the Gun That Belonged to Elvis from its shoulder holster. “They still seem to be going at it.”

Semple kicked angrily at the rubble and turned to face the two men. “It’s fucking Aimee.”

Doc frowned. “Your sister did all this?”

“She did some of it when she blew me into Limbo, but I think the rest of it’s the work of Bernadette and her rebel nuns. I’ll lay Vegas odds that the inevitable uprising has risen, and this is collateral damage.”

Jim and Doc looked at her with unhappy frowns. “Rebel nuns?”

“Uprising?”

“Collateral damage?”

“Don’t we even get a chance to recover from the Dragon Ride?”

The Dragon Ride, although a close relative of the more familiar wind-walking, had been an arduous and exhausting experience. The violent psychic buffeting and energy shifts, the nightmare apparitions and hallucinations, all left Jim’s and Doc’s minds feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated. Semple might have complained of being equally ripped and crumpled, except that she was running on the adrenaline rush of a foul fury. Partway through the nerve-wrenching experience, Jim had wondered if perhaps some joker of yore, with an arcane, Hell-spawned sense of humor, had deliberately arranged for the ancient escape route to be as harrowing as possible, passing as it did though the death-stinking, blood-soaked interior of the Pyramid of the Moon, the hideous fetid lair of the Great Decapitator of the Moche, and through interstellar space, amid death rays, particle beams, and bad science fiction as Battlestar Galactica fought off an attack by the Cylons under Count Baltar.

Jim looked from Doc to Semple as another burst of gunfire rattled the here and now. “I don’t know about you two, but I’d be willing to move on someplace else.” Semple stared at him grimly but said nothing. Jim grimaced and shook his head. He knew she was upset, but the facts had to be faced. “I hate to say this, babe, but this place is trashed beyond repair and I really don’t see how it can do us or anyone else any good to get involved in some feminist jihad.”

To underline his point, a faint tremor shook the ground, but Semple could only snarl. “They wrecked my fucking place. I want to see someone suffer for what’s happened to it.”

The clap of a distant grenade going off made Doc shake his head. “It can be kinda hard to extract payback when you’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

Jim immediately backed him up. He felt sorry for Semple, but the shooting was coming closer. “He’s right, girl. Our best bet is to get the fuck out of here.”

Semple, however, was ready to make a stand. “And how the hell do we do that? After that damned Dragon Ride, none of us has an iota of energy left. We couldn’t so much as levitate across the room.”

She had a serious point, but Jim was starting to lose patience. “So what do you suggest we do?”

Before Semple could answer, something moved in the shadows by the fallen Moorish archway. A young woman stepped around a curved panel from the fallen dome. Her head was shaved cue-ball smooth, and she wore a red robe with a strange gold insignia of a clawhammer and three nails on the breast. This had to be the new uniform of Bernadette and her mutineers; the red of the habit was most likely symbolic of the blood spilled by the serial killer Jesus, while the meaning of the hammer and nails was pretty much self-evident. A little incongruously, the nun-militant wore paratroopers’ heavy-duty lace-up jump boots, and bandoleers of ammunition across her chest. She also held a late-twentieth-century machine gun trained on the three of them. The rebel nun seemed in no way intimidated by the sudden appearance of Semple, Jim, and Doc. The muzzle of the weapon didn’t waver as she moved through the arch and into the chamber.

“The three of you stay right where you are.”

***

A second concussion grenade exploded and the nearest rubber guard folded and collapsed, a thick, dark blue liquid flowing from a rent in its hide and oozing thickly across the floor of the corridor. Plaster drifted down from the ceiling and small fires burned amid the debris of previous explosions. Red-clad nuns advanced down the corridor in fast zigzag rushes, firing bursts from their MAC-10s and AK-47s. Even with the help of Semple’s strange, soft-shelled robot guards, it was clear to Mr. Thomas that Aimee and her handful of loyalists were fighting a losing battle. They were steadily being pushed back, room by room, corridor by corridor, staircase by staircase. The rebels, in their new red habits and freshly shaved heads, were taking casualties, but it hardly mattered. Clearly these red sisters were happy to go to the pods in the righteous cause of Bernadette, the Hammer of God, their leader and inspiration. If it came to a battle of attrition, Aimee’s little band simply lacked the numbers to win. The hopeless course was set for their last stand. Run out of her Heaven and forced to take refuge in the despised domain of her destroyed sibling, her options were scant: it was either go down fighting or give herself up for crucifixion.

Mr. Thomas had no desire to make Thomas the Goat’s last stand, but from where he stood at the far end of the burning corridor, as far from the fighting as he could get, he wasn’t holding out that much hope. His eyes were burning and watering from the smoke, and precious little retreat remained. He was starting to resign himself to taking on a new incarnation. He could only tell himself that maybe he’d gone as far as he could go in goat form; perhaps it was time for a change. As far has he could see, his one hope to remain in this reality was somehow to separate himself so the mutineers wouldn’t associate him with Aimee. He needed to make himself look like an innocent victim, or maybe even a helpless hostage. Could he get himself some kind of Lamb of God gig with the new regime, and lie around all day being fed beer and glossy magazines by bald, red-robed nuns? It was a long shot. He knew “Goat of God” didn’t exactly have the same ring to it.

Another grenade went off and started a flurry of commotion among the defenders. Mr. Thomas couldn’t quite see what was happening through all the smoke and dust until the dirty white rag was waved aloft tied to a piece of broken lath. That message was unmistakable. Aimee McPherson had given up the fight. The towel had been thrown in. Mr. Thomas knew it wasn’t a flag of truce. It had to be unconditional surrender. As far as he was concerned, the only question that remained was whether or not a goat could be crucified.

***

“It would seem we have a Mexican standoff.”

Despite the machine pistol the red-robed nun had pointed at Doc, a lot of her militancy dropped away when she found herself staring down the barrel of the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. The legendary pistol had magically appeared in Doc’s right hand, trained at her head. At the sight of her confusion, Doc laughed. “I wouldn’t be too upset, my dear. Drunk and sober, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very, very long time. It’s no disgrace to be faced down by Doc Holliday.” He inclined his head and looked more closely at the young woman. “Don’t I know you?”

The rebel nun looked sheepish. “Yeah, Doc. You know me. You’d probably recognize me straightaway if it wasn’t for the haircut.”

Doc frowned. “You’re . . . ”

“I’m Aura-Lee. I used to work at . . . ”

Doc smiled. He didn’t need to be told any more. “Right.”

“Until I renounced the sins of the flesh-”

“The sins of the flesh? Aren’t we getting a little overbearingly Victorian? From what I recall, you used to quite enjoy your work.”

“I only enjoyed it because I didn’t know any better. Bernadette told us-”

“Bernadette? Who the hell is Bernadette?

“Bernadette is the Hammer of God.”

Doc was starting to look as though he didn’t have time for this. “What the fuck kind of title is the Hammer of God?”

“You knew her as Trixie.”

“Trixie? She’s behind all this? That troublemaking bitch is calling herself ‘Bernadette the Hammer of God’? I always had her pegged as whorehouse lawyer, but I didn’t think she’d go as far as to infect you all with bloody Jesus.”

Aura-Lee looked exceedingly unhappy. “I always liked you, Doc. You always treated me on the up and up, but you have to be careful what you say about Bernadette. Very soon, she’s going to be deciding your fate.”

Doc’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “A lot of people have been convinced they could decide Doc Holliday’s fate.”

“Please be careful. She’ll be here very soon.”

***

A cherub, scarcely taller than Mr. Thomas, clad in a red diaper with little fleecy wings growing out of his back, clambered over a pile of rubble. Mr. Thomas might have laughed at the spectacle except for the big chrome .44 Magnum the cherub had gripped in his chubby fist, and the intimation that, small as he might be, he knew how to use it. When he saw Mr. Thomas, he stopped in his tracks and brought the gun up. “Feel lucky, punk? I suggest you raise your hands, nice and easy, now.”

Mr. Thomas didn’t like having guns pointed at him, especially by fat little cherubs with implausible baby voices pretending they were Clint Eastwood. It took him a moment to find his own voice, and when he did, it rasped from smoke and apprehension. “I can’t raise my hands up. All I have is hooves.”

“So raise your hooves.”

“I can’t do that. If I did, I’d fall over. I’m a bloody quadruped, you moron.”

The cherub brandished the Magnum in Mr. Thomas’s face. “Don’t you call me a moron.”

Mr. Thomas instantly realized that insulting anyone holding the most powerful handgun in the world, even if that someone was only three feet tall, was a moronic act. “Listen, kid, I’m sorry. I’m suffering from a lot of stress, you see?”

The cherub stuck to the basics. “Quadruped or not, you’re my prisoner.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? All this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’m an innocent bystander, aren’t I? A noncombatant, look you. I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“You’ll have to tell that to Bernadette. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a prisoner.”

The cherub turned. Bernadette and her red nuns were coming down the corridor. The cherub gestured to Bernadette. “There’s another one over here, Mighty Hammer.”

***

As Bernadette came through the arch and into the chamber, followed by her armed cohorts and bound prisoners, one of whom was a loudly protesting goat, Doc and Aura-Lee continued to stand with their guns mutually trained on each other. Doc knew that the arrival of the main body of the insurgents totally changed the dynamics of the confrontation, and the new odds were definitely not in his favor. Doc wasn’t about to admit this, though, or even acknowledge it in word or deed. Two dozen guns might have been pointed at him, but he was quite prepared to bluff to the last. Jim and Semple, being completely unarmed, knew they had little choice but to go wherever Doc’s lead might take them. Semple had no illusions of receiving any mercy at the hands of Bernadette.

As Jim pretty much expected, Doc started his game with an openly reckless lack of concern. He looked past Aura-Lee and called out cheerfully to Bernadette, “How are you doing, Trixie? Aura-Lee tells me you’re calling yourself the Hammer of God these days. Do you really think God needs a hammer?”

Bernadette colored and cast about for an angry retort, but Doc pressed blithely on. “Is that Donna I see there with her head all shaved and toting that M-16? And Lisa and Linda and Matilida, and Charlotte at the back there trying to hide her face? Seems to me we’ve got ourselves a real reunion, all my whores who went holy.”

Bernadette finally found her voice.

“What the hell are you doing here, John Holliday?”

“John Holliday, is it? You can’t call me Doc anymore? After all the good times we spent together, way back whenever it was?”

Bernadette flushed all the way to the top of her shaved head. The other ranks were looking to her for guidance, but even with a multitude of guns at her back it wasn’t easy to confront Doc Holliday’s glib and perverse charm. “Good times. You can talk about good times after all the awful things you forced us to do?”

“Isn’t your memory getting a little distorted here, Trixie, my darling? I don’t recall anyone being forced to do anything.”

“I asked you what you were doing here, Doc.”

“Doing here? Why, Trixie, I’m hardly doing anything here. I just happened to stop by on my way out of Hell with my good friends Jim Morrison and Semple McPherson.”

At the mention of Semple’s name, Aimee immediately let out a wail. “Semple, do something, for God’s sake. She’s going to crucify us.”

An angel clapped a hand over Aimee’s mouth, cutting off her cries. Semple didn’t move; she was too focused on the interchange between Doc and Bernadette. Bernadette took a step closer to Doc. “Maybe you should have stayed in Hell.”

As Bernadette spoke, the environment shook once more, this time violently, and with a deep and primally disturbing sub-bass rumble that threatened to liquefy the brain of everyone present. As the shaking escalated to a bouncing side-to-side motion, a number of people were thrown to the ground, and wide fissures appeared in the floor. An angel fluttered his wings, attempting to maintain his balance, and a red nun dropped her Uzi, causing it to discharge and accidentally waste two of her comrades. As Jim braced his legs, struggling to stay on his feet, he saw a way to back Doc’s play. Capitalizing on the fact that victorious euphoria was rapidly being replaced by a superstitious dread, he shouted so all the nuns could hear, “It doesn’t look like God’s too pleased with what you’ve been up to.”

The shaking subsided slightly and Semple took this as her cue to step up beside Doc and face Bernadette. She took a more practical tack. “As the creator of this place, I think I should warn you that it’s about to come completely apart.”

Even Bernadette put her theocratic power play to one side in the face of the emergency. “What do we do?”

“My best bet would be to pool our resources and wind-walk the fuck out of here before we’re all toast.”

Semple’s expression was bleak. “With our resources, the only place we’re going is Heaven.”

***

Jim had never seen Aimee’s Heaven in its overtime Walt Disney glory, and the damage and decay only caused him to wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever have wanted to live there. Most of the buildings were now burned-out, smoke-scarred ruins. The great lawn was plowed up by shell craters, and a World War II vintage Nazi Tiger tank, crudely painted a garish scarlet, stood abandoned on Aimee’s favorite terrace overlooking the lake, where it had apparently been shelling the bejesus out of the Great Cloister with its turret-mounted eighty-eight. Shells and mortars had shattered the trees on the headland where virgins once danced, and reduced the Maxfield Parrish temple to a pile of rubble. Dead bluebirds littered the ground, where they’d expired with beaks agape and feet in the air. Weird mutated Bambis lurked in the ruins, five-legged and two-headed, Siamese twins and ones who looked perfectly normal except for foam at the edges of their nostrils and a distant rabid stare. The lake itself was now nothing more than a gray-green expanse of dead, polluted water with the flotsam of conflict floating on its oily surface, while over everything lowered a threatening sky the color of elderly mold.

As Jim got to his feet after falling heavily out of the end of the wind-walk, he looked round in total disbelief. “What the fuck is this place, some kind of physical representation of clinical depression?” He glanced at one of Bernadette’s angels who had emerged right beside him. “This is what you were fighting over?”

Just to complicate matters even further, the mass wind-walk from Semple’s imploding environment had turned out to be a major disaster. Jim had been one of the lucky ones. He’d only materialized in Heaven a couple of feet off the ground and suffered nothing worse than a mildly bruising fall. A half dozen of Bernadette’s nuns had been so tightly bunched up when they made their exit that they had merged in transit into a hideous composite of limbs, heads, and tattered pieces of bloody garment protruding from a shapeless mass of amorphous flesh like a joint nightmare of Francis Bacon and John Carpenter. Doc had emerged close to this abhorrent mess of human meat and was staring at it with grim revulsion. The heads and mouths that remained on the outside of the quivering mound of tissue started to scream in unison. “Finish us! Finish us!”

Doc turned and beckoned quickly to Bernadette. “Are you going to get your people to destroy that thing or do I have to shoot it myself?”

“Shoot it?” Bernadette looked groggy and was having difficulty grasping what was going on. She might even have been regretting her grab for power.

Doc glared angrily at her. “Yes, shoot it. Or blow it up with a grenade. Put the poor bastards out of their misery one way or another.”

The screaming went on. “Finish us! Finish us!”

Bernadette was close to panic. “I can’t waste my own people.”

Doc’s voice was tinged with contempt. “It goes with the territory. Put up or shut up.”

Bernadette held out a hand and a nun gave her a German stick grenade. Doc tried to shout a warning as she pulled out the pin. “Let the rest of us get fucking clear first!”

But he was too late. She’d already tossed the potato masher into the screaming flesh.

***

A large number of nuns and angels ran straight for the lake to wash away the gore. Among them was Semple, who had a clot of brain tissue lodged in her hair, but most came to a halt before they reached the water’s edge. Already spooked by the wind-walk and the subsequent vile disaster and explosion, the sight of a huge white letterbox-format screen, more than seventy feet across, rising majestically from the waters of the lake had the majority of them down on their knees, praying for their souls and sanity. The screen continued to rise until it was floating ten feet above the surface, with no visible means of support. It was hardly a biblical apparition, neither a leviathan nor a burning bush. Either of those might have been more understandable to the nuns. At least they would have been congruent with their religious zeal. Something so techno-geometric filled them with more irrational dread than the sight of Jonah’s whale, a pillar of fire, or the Archangel Gabriel playing a Miles Davis composition on his trumpet.

Jim was probably one of the first to realize what it was: a big Diamond Vision projection TV screen of the kind that had come into use at big-time stadium rock concerts a few years after his death. Certainly, along with Doc and Semple, he was one of the few who didn’t go into a paroxysm of Pentecostal confusion when the first image appeared on the screen. To Jim’s relief, it wasn’t some rerun of a middle-aged Mick Jagger in concert, but a logo sequence of a woman’s arm brandishing a gleaming sword, rising slowly from a crystal-clear, pristine lake that put Aimee’s stagnant body of water to shame. The arm was accompanied by a written legend in veveVoodoo characters. After holding for about twenty seconds, it was replaced by three huge and formidable close-ups of Dr. Hypodermic, Danbhala La Flambeau, and Baron Tonnerre. They peered from the screen as though, via some two-way system, they were seeing the inhabitants of Heaven just as the inhabitants were seeing them.

After carefully inspecting whatever image they were viewing, Hypodermic glanced at La Flambeau. “It’s all going according to plan, wouldn’t you say?”

Although Jim well knew that gods were impossibly hard to read, they seemed inordinately pleased at the ravages that Aimee’s Heaven had so far suffered. Doc glanced at Jim. “What do you think they’re doing this for?”

La Flambeau leaned forward as though searching for something. Finally she spotted what she sought, smiled, and pointed. “There you are, Jim Morrison. And Doc Holliday, too. Where’s the McPherson girl?”

“She’s washing her hair. She got somebody’s brains in it.”

La Flambeau glanced at the male gods on either side of her and then looked down at Jim and Doc. “The Doctor and the Baron don’t particularly want to admit it, but we all feel that all three of you have done an excellent job.”

Jim and Doc looked at each other in surprise. “We have?”

“Indeed you have. This place is now a shambles and no new religion is going to start up here.”

Doc raised a dangerous eyebrow. “And that’s what we’ve been doing? Putting down self-appointed deities?”

Jim was thinking. “What I don’t understand is why you should need us to do the dirty work. I mean, you’re gods-you’re all-powerful. You could have taken out Anubis with a deftly aimed thunderbolt anytime you wanted.”

The Baron scowled. Jim had never heard him speak in English before and his voice rolled out like thunder on the mountain. “We’re gods, little man. We have more important considerations to absorb our time and our energy. We’re too ancient to get our own hands dirty. And why should we, when we can manipulate the human dead to do it for us?”

La Flambeau smiled indulgently. “The McPherson girl set in motion a chain of events that caused Gojiro to destroy both Moses and Anubis. And then these women crucified the one who wanted to be Jesus. And now you appear to have neutralized the absurd Aimee and this equally ridiculous Bernadette who calls herself the Hammer of God.”

Unfortunately, Bernadette chose that moment to demonstrate that she wasn’t quite as neutralized as La Flambeau might have assumed. She stood up in eighteen inches of dirty water, where she’d been washing the blood from her hands and face, and stared truculently at the big screen. “Listen, you trio of abominations. I am a servant of the One True God-”

Doc attempted to head her off. “Trixie, my dear, I advise you to table this defiant little speech of yours. You can’t even start to comprehend the kind of power you’re going up against.”

Bernadette glanced back at Doc but decided to ignore him. Once again she faced the screen. “I am the servant of God and nothing you demons can do will deflect me from my purpose.” She gestured to Doc and Jim. “I have the protection of faith around me, and if I decide to crucify these agents of Lucifer that you send against me, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Some of the red nuns seemed encouraged enough to start retrieving their guns. Jim feared that defeat was about be snatched from the jaws of victory, and he shouted at the Mysteres , “I know you don’t like to get your hands dirty, but why the fuck don’t you zap her right now and save us all a whole lot of trouble?”

The smile with which La Flambeau responded to Jim was nothing short of patronizing. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, mes petits. She is an alarmingly stupid human being and very soon she is actually going to meet her One True God.”

***

When she heard a sound behind her, Semple spun around and grabbed for the machine pistol, spraying water from her wet hair like a dog coming in from the rain. Only the sound of a familiar voice stopped her from firing blind. “Semple, it’s all right, it’s only me.”

Semple had been bent over what might well have been the last functioning sink in Heaven, washing the brains out of her hair with some of Heaven’s remaining hot water. Realizing she wasn’t going to get properly clean in the chaos by the lake, she had hunted through rubble-strewn rooms to find this final intact bathroom. By way of a precaution, she had picked up a red nun’s machine pistol that had been dropped in the confusion, and she didn’t lower it as she pushed her hair out of her eyes and regarded Aimee with slit-eyed distrust. Her sibling stood in the doorway of the bathroom in a filthy robe. “Please Semple. . . . ”

Semple’s lip curled. “Please Semple, what? Maybe I should just shoot you right there where you’re standing.”

“I know I did a bad thing, but . . . ”

“You know I’ve literally been to Hell and back since you saw me last?”

A hairline crack snaked across the ceiling. Both Aimee and Semple looked up at it. “If someone doesn’t stabilize this place, we’re going to be in an empty void without even a place to stand.”

“This Jim of yours, he could help pull Heaven back together?”

“Jim? Are you out of your mind? He’s not the Heaven-building type. He hates bluebirds.”

“He’d do it for you, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe for a while, but in the end he’d get bored and want to move on.”

“Could he at least help to stabilize it?”

Semple sighed and lowered the gun. “I suppose he might, but it wouldn’t stop there, would it? I know you, Aimee. You always have to push it. You always have to have that little bit more.”

“If this place falls apart, I’ll be finished.”

“You’ll survive, Aimee.”

“Will I? You’ve seen what happened when we were separated.”

“If Jim wants to leave, I’m going with him.”

“You’d choose a man over your sister? You’d just leave me to waste away and vanish?”

Semple turned; she couldn’t face her sister. “Shit, Aimee, don’t the guilt trips ever stop?”

***

Jim was becoming more than a little concerned about the deteriorating condition of the environment. It had been a mess when they had arrived; now it was becoming messier by the minute. Jagged orange-white lightning crashed between huge thunderheads that were rapidly moving in from beyond the mountains. The lake moved with bizarre and chaotic ripples, and huge bubbles broke the surface. The great screen still hung over it, but the images of the Mysteres were continuously distorted. The ground under Jim’s feet quivered, while on the headland a small but growing wind vortex whirled dirt, dead leaves, and the limp, lifeless corpses of bluebirds into the air. In the middle of it all, Bernadette was attempting to rally her nuns and angels. Jim yelled to Doc, “By the looks of it, we’ve got some apocalyptic trouble coming hard down on us.”

A sudden sinkhole, some twenty feet wide, opened in the terrace, right under the scarlet Tiger tank. The machine crashed down into it and its gas tank exploded, shooting flame, black smoke, and chunks of hot metal into the air. Doc coughed blood into his hankerchief and shook his head. “And I fear this is the bona fide end of the world. At least for this cosmic neck of the cosmic woods.”

In confirmation of just how bona fide the end of the world really was, a great light like something from the Book of Revelation blossomed in the sky. A nun began screaming, “It’s God, I see God!”

Doc stared at the sky with a resigned and quizzical expression. “Either that or a thermonuclear airburst was just added to our catalogue of woe.”

***

A section of corridor ceiling crashed down behind Aimee and Semple, and the two of them broke into a run. A crystal chandelier was dripping liquid glass like melting ice. The vibration was now worse than the worst earthquake Semple had ever experienced in lifeside Los Angeles or San Francisco. She was still carrying the gun she’d found, but she had little idea as to what she was going to do next. Her single impulse was to get out into the open before the entire structure collapsed and buried them. She imagined that if one was buried alive it could take an agonizing time to expire and that wasn’t the way she wanted to return to the pods, fighting for breath as dirt filled her mouth, nose, and lungs, and chunks of masonry crushed her bones. Her only thought was to get back to Jim and Doc, and if relying on the two men was the best she could come up with, she knew she was tactically tapped out.

The building shook again and a huge chunk of plaster smashed into the floor directly in front of them. Aimee stumbled over a fallen beam and would have gone down if Semple hadn’t grabbed her by the arm. “Just keep moving, okay? Just keep moving.”

Aime clung to Semple, her grip like a vice. “Semple, promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“Promise you won’t let me just disappear into nothing.”

***

The white light became approximately spherical and touched down between the lake and the terrace, if “touched down” was the right phrase. Bit by bit it began to diminish until it was no longer so hard on the eyes, and a figure became visible at its center. Jim wondered if perhaps one of the Mysteres had relented and decided to rescue them after all. Hypodermic, La Flambeau, and Tonnerre were still up on the screen, but the chance remained that some other Voodoo god had taken pity on them. If he was really lucky, maybe it was the beautiful Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, or at least Ogou Baba or the venerable Marie-Louise.

The glare of the sphere not only diminished, but flattened to the ground, became two-dimensional, and spread rapidly outward, running across what had once been Aimee’s prize lawn, hugging the contours in a perfect geometric ring of bright energy. Many of the nuns fled as it came toward them, but since Doc was standing his ground, Jim did the same, and as the arc of energy went past and through him he felt nothing but a slight electric tingle. He looked to Doc for some kind of comment, but Doc was staring intently at the figure that stood in the epicenter of the power ring.

The figure was certainly not one of the Voodoo gods Jim had previously seen, and totally lacked any trace of their characteristic flamboyance. In many respects, it resembled a Carthusian monk, in its full-length gray robe. The cowl was pulled up and forward over the being’s face, so it was fully hidden from Jim. As the ring of light reached what seemed to be some outer perimeter and faded to nothing, the figure slowly turned and raised a hand in greeting to the three Mysteres on the screen, who, in turn, bowed with infinite courtesy. The exchange was so mutually respectful that Jim could only assume the salutations were between entities who were acknowledged equals. With the niceties of formal protocol observed, the robed figure shifted its attention to what was going on around it, and actually spoke. To Jim’s complete surprise, the figure’s voice had the carefully trained and modulated tones of an English Shakespearean actor. “Would someone like to explain what exactly is going on here?”

Jim looked at Doc and Doc looked at Jim, and all of the nuns looked at each other. Since the question had not been specifically directed at anyone in particular, everyone seemed to be wondering who ought to answer and waiting for someone else to step into the breach. For a moment it looked as though Doc was going to make the move. He drew himself up to his full height and coughed once, but before he could utter a word, Semple and Aimee appeared on the terrace. Semple looked more angry and distraught than Jim had ever seen her. She also had a gun in her hand, a small, light-caliber machine pistol that must have been dropped by one of the red nuns. At first sight of the robed figure, she didn’t hesitate. She lifted the pistol and fired a withering, full-auto burst straight at it.

***

When Semple saw Anubis’s onetime Dream Warden standing on the scorched earth between the terrace and the lake, all thought and reason left her. She lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger. She didn’t even know if the pistol would fire at all. It might even have been out of ammunition and completely useless. It actually came as a total surprise when the thing roared and bucked in her hand, spraying out the entire contents of the clip in what seemed like little more than a second. She was equally surprised when the burst of fire had no effect whatsoever on its target. With a move so leisurely it could only have been a time distortion, the Dream Warden raised a hand, and a curved, shimmering, bullet-stopping energy field appeared in front of his body. Furious at the ineffectual pointlessness of her reaction, Semple hurled the gun petulantly to the ground, anticipating hideous retribution at any moment. Her third surprise was when the Dream Warden, instead of blasting her to horrible perdition, merely sounded a little disappointed. “Now, is that any way for old acquaintances to greet each other?”

“Acquaintances ?”

“We were both at the court of Anubis.”

“You were the fucking heart of darkness, the evil behind the throne . . . ”

The Dream Warden sounded quite pleased with himself. “I can pull together rather a good show when I put my mind to it.”

“A show . . . ?”

“Couldn’t you tell I was feeding his madness? I like to think that you and I, with a little help from Gojiro, did a reasonably efficient job of getting rid of him and his wretched kingdom.”

Semple almost pleaded. “Who are you?”

The Dream Warden sighed. “Oh dear, I suppose it was a mistake to arrive in the Dream Warden drag, but I do rather like the way it stops people from wanting me to do things for them.”

The Dream Warden unbelted the robe and let it fall to the ground at his feet, and Semple found herself facing a cultivatedly distinguished middle-aged man who greatly resembled the actor Christopher Plummer. He was dressed in an immaculate double-breasted white linen Savile Row suit with every crease as sharp as a knife. An aquamarine shirt with a matching Windsor-knotted tie gave a roguish, almost mobster aspect to the ensemble, although this was offset by a slight femininity of posture. Semple wasn’t sure if he was actually homosexual or merely arrogantly English. A white Persian cat that must have been hidden in the sleeve of the Dream Warden robe scrambled up onto his shoulder and sat staring at Semple with blue eyes that nearly matched the shirt and tie.

Although this revelation was more than enough to convince Semple that she was in the presence of an entity of great importance and power, she was still without a clue as to who this might be. Jim was looking around curiously; even Aimee herself was totally mystified. The only one who appeared to suspect was Doc, who had an amused smile on his face. It took Mr. Thomas, emerging from where he’d been hiding behind a marble copy of Michelangelo’s David, to effect a less-than-conventional introduction.

“Don’t you gaggle of fucking idiots know who this is? It’s Him, isn’t it? Yahweh, the Lord God Jehovah, and all of the other Thousand Names. It’s bloody God himself, look you.”

***

The voice of a nun came from somewhere at the back of the crowd. “I told you it was God.”

God made a self-depreciating gesture. “I used to be Allah as well, but we had to subdivide around the twelfth century. The crusades were making us schizophrenic.”

A number of nuns were already on their knees, and angels and cherubs were starting to gaze with all the adoration that was expected of them. Aimee, on the other hand, wasn’t buying so soon. “You’re really God? Not just another of Semple’s malicious pranks?”

God sighed. “What did you expect? George Burns?”

“There’s been a lot of unfortunate confusion here lately.”

“Surely you don’t want me to prove it to you? I don’t have to walk on the lake or anything, do I?” He noticed Doc Holliday at a distance and nodded with genteel courtesy. “How are you, Dr. Holliday?”

“I’m feeling pretty well, my Lord. How about your good self?”

“I fear I may be looking at a few problems here.”

Aimee stared at Doc. All the color had drained from her face. “He is God.”

Doc gestured in the affirmative. “The Lord of Hosts and none other.”

God looked amusedly resentful. “So, Aimee McPherson, you need Doc Holliday to confirm my identity?”

Not only did Aimee’s color return, but she was rapidly developing the expression of a near-psychotic. “Damn right, I need Doc Holliday to confirm your identity. The last one had a halo and called himself Jesus, but then he turned out to be Ted Bundy. How I am I supposed to tell? When did you ever make thyself beknown to me? When was I granted the revelation? When did I ever see even one of your faces? I’ve devoted my entire life and hereafter to lauding and magnifying your name, and what have you given me in return? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Not a sign, not a rainbow that I didn’t have to make myself. Not so much as a phone call. You couldn’t even pick up a gold phone and tell me, ‘Keep up the good work, Sister Aimee’? Oh no. That would have been too much effort. And now you’re surprised I don’t immediately recognize you and fall on my face when you show up in your fancy handmade ice-cream suit and your four-hundred-dollar blow-dry haircut. Well, I’m sorry, my Lord, but adoration is supposed to be a two-way street.”

God gestured to Doc. “You see what I mean? They all expect something from me.”

Doc demurred. “Fortunately, I have such a bad reputation, few are disappointed at the way I treat them.”

***

The Persian cat smiled at Jim. “He’s very good at talking to everyone at once.”

“I don’t know how He does it.”

“Well, He’s God, isn’t He?”

“It all sounds like babble to me.”

“That’s because you have a poet’s sensibility. Mr. Thomas hears much the same thing. The others all think they’re having a one-on-one with their Creator.”

“What are they all talking about?”

“Most of the nuns are just behaving like fans, gushing compliments and making themselves ridiculous. A few want favors, dispensations, or forgiveness for their sins. The Aimee half of the McPherson sisters has totally lost it, and she’s berating him as though he were an unfaithful lover. The hooker called Trixie, who turned herself into Bernadette, is boasting about all the sinners she’s sent to the pods on his behalf, and he and Doc are discussing the finer points of single-malt scotch.”

“That’s a pretty neat trick.”

“I think he’d rather dispense with the rest and just be talking to Doc.”

“And what’s Semple doing?”

“She’s keeping quiet. She seems a little bemused.”

***

“I’m sorry, Aimee, but you have fallen for the same self-delusion as hundreds of thousands before you. You humans constantly operate under the assumption that I, God, give a rat’s ass about the petty comings and going of a species of big-brained, overdeveloped, and rather violent monkeys. It’s just plain absurd. Some of you start praying to me when you lose your bloody car keys. Okay, a prayer is a prayer, and I don’t mind fending off the odd holocaust or arranging a cancer remission if it’s in a good cause, but car keys? Football games? Lotto? The two-thirty at Aqueduct? Give me a break. It’s nothing more than theological junk mail. All it makes me do is want to put as much distance between myself and humanity as I can. Yes, bad things do happen to good people. And no, Aimee, there is no Santa Claus. It’s a cruel and random universe, full of black holes and entropy, where all manner of terrible things happen, deserved or not. And contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t make it, either in a week or two billion years, so you can’t blame me when shit comes to pass. Poor little crippled children are a DNA freakout, not a result of any malice on my part. Ebola was a result of you morons cutting down the rainforest, not my divine bloody judgment. I only added a few of the finishing touches-orchids, woodpeckers, and, to my eternal shame, you nasty humans. Believe me, as far as the rest goes, the math is far too complicated. The universe was originally put together by a consortium of forces that I can only just understand and you couldn’t even begin to take my word for. Have you any idea what the numbers for the Theory of Everything look like? They make quantum mechanics look like two plus two.”

“But it says in the Bible-”

“I’m God, so please don’t quote the Bible to me. That’s another of the great fallacies. I didn’t write that ridiculous book. You think I have nothing better to do with my time than sit around writing inane dietary laws, accounts of primitive battles, and long, boring lists of who begat whom? There’s a Gideon Bible in every hotel room only because MKULTRA put microchips under the gold leaf on the cover. The hippies who used to use the pages to roll joints with when they ran out of skins had the right idea. The damned Bible was cobbled together by a bunch of ancient, too-long-in-the-sun psychopaths sitting in caves in the stinking desert, finished up by a conspiracy of patriarchal prehistoric sheep herders who wanted to believe that, somewhere in the sky, there was some Great Shepherd who would take care of them the way they took care of their blasted sheep and goats. And don’t look at me like that, Mr. Thomas. I have nothing against goats; in fact, I number them among my more likable creations. It’s the shepherds I have the quarrel with. I mean, they only had to see a bloody bush catch fire and they were off and running. Do you know just how stupid the original Moses was? It took the fool forty years to get across the bloody Sinai. T. E. Lawrence did it on a camel in less than a week and he took time off to kill one of his boyfriends on the way by dropping him in quicksand.”

Aimee was floundering. She would have liked to believe that this so-called God was some preposterous impostor, but she knew in her heart that she was talking to the real deal and her heart was plunging to the sub-basement. Just to make matters worse, each time she opened her mouth, it sounded like the blurt of an imbecile. “You mean Lawrence of Arabia?”

God nodded. “The very same. I thought O’Toole played him very nicely.”

“But what about Jesus? Didn’t you send him to save us all from original sin?”

“That’s what he told you, wasn’t it? Actually, I just wanted to get him to leave home. The kid was a pain to be around.”

“But the Jesus that was here-”

“That homicidal idiot. I don’t know if he was the genuine article or not. It’s been so long, I’ve actually lost track. Either way, that boy was a born troublemaker. I take it you crucified him yet again? It’s usually the best thing for him. It gets him out of the way for a while. The only trouble is, he comes back twice as nasty. He was actually quite well-meaning the first couple of times around. But then the power started to get to him. Loaves and fishes weren’t good enough. Oh dear me, no. First he got into starting wars and pogroms; now the latest fad seems to be old movies and serial killing.”

“But he might have really been your son?”

“Who can tell these days, with so many impostors coming out of the pods? Either way, he’s certainly better off crucified.”

***

The Persian cat continued to look at Jim. “You see what I mean about multiple conversations?”

Jim nodded. “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

“Aren’t you glad you’re well out of it?”

“I surely am.”

***

“Now, listen, Trixie . . . ”

“I’m not Trixie anymore. I’m Bernadette.”

God gestured impatiently. “Yes, yes, I know all about that. You fancy yourself as Bernadette, the Hammer of God. Well, I’m sorry, lovey, I’m God and I have absolutely no need of a hammer. I have no desire to hammer in either the evening or the morning, and if I did, I’d go to the ironmongers and buy one.”

“But I-”

“Please don’t interrupt.”

“But I was-”

“I said, don’t interrupt. As it is, I’m not particularly pleased with you, and if you keep interrupting, I may have to do something judgmental. Don’t you think I’ve had to deal with your kind before? It’s really all about sex, isn’t it. Sex and more bloody sex. That’s all you overblown chimps seem to have on your minds. I know what those machine guns and phallic blasted missiles are all about. I’ve seen hundreds like you before, and you never fail to annoy me. I blame it all on that absurd prude Saint Paul. The repressed Syrian tentmaker fouled everything up. The man was completely obsessed with sex. He couldn’t stand the very thought of it. Hated women more than he probably hated himself. Started all those fish-smell jokes. I never encountered such a rancid mind in anyone who managed to get himself canonized. And, believe me, there were some foully rancid saints. And then there were all the bloody Popes that came after him, and those repulsive fools Ferdinand and Isabella, not only putting up the money to find America when it wasn’t lost in the first place, but also forking over the cash for the disgusting Inquisition so people could be branded with hot irons and have their eyeballs gouged out and be hanged and burned alive, and all in my name. I’m God, damn it! I absolutely don’t care what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, or even out in the street, for that matter, as long as they don’t annoy the horses. I think Tennessee said it best when he had Blanche Dubois deliver the line, “I’m never disgusted by anything human as long as it isn’t unkind or violent,” or words to that effect, I don’t remember it all that well. My recent trouble with Marlon has quite put the exact text of Streetcar out of my mind. Unfortunately, most of what your kind do is very unkind and ultraviolent. Do you really think that, if I wanted human beings to be celibate, I would have given them genitals and the urge to use them in the first place?”

He halted in his holy tirade and looked hard at Bernadette. “You’re not taking any of this in, are you?”

“I’m trying to.”

God sniffed. “I’m not sure you’re trying hard enough.”

“I’m still a little confused.”

“Yes, and you’ll probably stay confused for all of eternity, so I suggest you go away, think about it, and stop bothering me.”

He clapped his hands once and Bernadette/Trixie vanished into thin air. God then turned and looked at Jim.

***

“And what about you, Morrison? You don’t have much to say for yourself?”

“I didn’t think there was much point in adding to the babble.”

“That’s right-you used to be a poet, didn’t you? I’m glad you still have the magical hearing, even if you refuse to do anything with it.”

“There’s also the small matter that I never really believed in you.”

God laughed. “And now you feel a little sheepish, with me standing here in all my glory?”

Jim spread his hands and half-smiled. “Something like that.”

“What was that line? ‘You cannot petition the Lord with prayer’?”

“That’s what I wrote.”

God smiled. “And never was a truer line written. Do you know how irksome it can be getting prayed at all the time? I was just telling Aimee McPherson all about it.”

“I had teenage fans when I was a rock star.”

“Then you do have a vague idea. Is something else bothering you?”

Jim hesitated. “There is one thing that’s puzzling me.”

“And what’s that?”

“I thought you claimed you were the only God. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ and all of that stuff.” Jim gestured to the screen in the middle of the lake. “And yet you seem to have no trouble getting along with those guys.”

God grinned slyly. “That’s because I lied.”

Jim was amazed. “You lied?”

“You think God doesn’t lie?”

“I kind of assumed you were perfect.”

God blinked. Now it was his turn to be surprised. “If deception was an imperfection, Shakespeare would have been a tax collector. You, if anyone, ought to know that.”

“So why the big deal about being the one and only? It kind of set things up for a whole mess of intolerance.”

God shrugged. “Maybe. But as I was just attempting to explain to the truly confused Trixie, humans hardly need an excuse to torture, slaughter, and generally victimize each other. It’s a thing with us gods. You either join a pantheon or you avoid complications by putting it around that you’re the one true deity. I couldn’t really handle a pantheon. I believe I’m what sociologists call unclubable.”

***

God turned his attention from Jim, looked around at everyone present, and raised an authoritarian hand.

“If you’ll be so kind as to simmer down for a moment, I have a few general remarks that I’d like to address to all of you.”

God waited and the babble slowly died away in Jim’s head. Then God took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

He paused to scan the faces that were now giving him their undivided, and, in some cases, very apprehensive attention. “As you’ve all probably gathered by now, I’m not overly enamored of the human race. When the Cro-Magnons started in slaughtering Neanderthals, I pretty much knew that, as a species, you were well off the rails already. I wanted to flood you all out, but I allowed that wretched Noah to talk me into letting him build his ark because he promised to save the giraffes and the rhinoceroses. A little later, I seriously believed that the aliens where going to nuke you all to extinction, but all they did was fry Sodom and Gomorrah, which I guess only tends to confirm how wrong I can be when it comes to humanity. I didn’t much like the Roman Empire; the Dark Ages were a mess; I suppose the Renaissance was okay, but then the Industrial Revolution started the whole fossil fuel greenhouse thing going and I knew it would only be a matter of time before you turned it all over to the roaches. What you might call the last straw, the thing that really pissed me off, was that Time cover story. There it was, white out of black-GOD IS DEAD-in damned great letters, and I decided to give up on the whole pack of you. If you chose to think I was dead, so be it. I was history. You had a gang of oily evangelists to address your needs to worship, and I was about to take a cab.”

At this last statement, Aimee colored beet-red. God treated her to a raised eyebrow and then continued. “In fact, I was very tempted to destroy the whole planet: fire, pestilence, plagues of frogs, every volcano going off at once. The entire apocalyptic works. I was even toying with the idea of making the sun go nova, or at least dropping a large asteroid in the Pacific Ocean. About the only thing that stopped me is that I’m still inordinately fond of giraffes and rhinos-and also cats and whales, harp seals, dolphins, bears, and penguins-so I refrained. Why should they vanish without a trace just because you bipedal bastards are unable to behave yourselves? Oh yes, I know you built some very nice cathedrals, and I really liked Marilyn Monroe and fettuccine alfredo. But they were, in turn, canceled out by your concentration camps, Queen for a Day, and man-made neurotoxins. In some respects, I suppose I only have myself to blame. Right back at the beginning, I should have made the entire Earth fireproof. If you’d never discovered fire, your kind would have remained a bunch of monkeys standing up to peer over the tall grass. My only excuse is that I didn’t imagine you would be cunning enough to go from rubbing two sticks together to a thermonuclear weapons capability in little more than the flutter of a cosmic eyelash.”

God paused to pet the white Persian cat, who was growing restless. “Thus, right or wrong, I decided against wiping you all out, and resolved instead simply to wash my hands of the great majority of you. For some time now, I’ve been happily going about my business with no inclination to worry about the human race. Your prayers all went into the shredder and, for the first time in about fourteen thousand years, I was without a care. Then, unfortunately, a deputation of my peers and colleagues came to me to appeal to my better nature.”

God gestured to the Mysteres on the big screen. “These good Voodoo people of the Island, plus also Wotan, Krishna, Isis, the White Goddess Sofia, Oogachaka, Crom, Head 58, the Lord Bacchus, Snireth-Ko the Dreamer, and even the Buddha-although he seemed a lot more preoccupied with his next earthly incarnation-all prevailed on my good graces to help them try to find a solution to the human problem. Wotan was talking about a final solution, but having decided once not to wipe you all out, I didn’t think it was good policy to go back on my word. Also, the old boy is a little addled from all the drinking in Valhalla and he couldn’t really grasp how decimating your numbers on the lifeside would hardly have helped what was really bothering them.”

Again God paused. He lifted the cat down from his shoulder and placed it on the ground beside him. It rubbed against his leg and then looked up at him. “You know we’re supposed to be at the meeting with Stephen Hawking? The one about trying to encourage dark matter to do something useful?”

God glanced down at the cat. “Professor Hawking has a very flexible appreciation of time. He won’t mind if I’m a little late. Besides, I still have a few more choice remarks to deliver.”

He looked back to the small multitude in the ruins of Heaven. “Since my friend here informs me that I’m late for my next meeting, I’ll give you all the Reader’s Digest version. In a nutshell, we gods are angry. Not being content with gratuitously overpopulating your life-side planet to the point where it will be almost completely uninhabitable by a week from Thursday, you are streaming into the Afterlife in such numbers that the infrastructure cannot possibly support you all. The Great Double Helix is currently groaning under the weight of all the extra pods and shorting out its primary circuits. That’s why we couldn’t allow Wotan to go ahead with his Day of Ragnarok extermination plan. The influx of the dead would be so massive it’d red-line the macroboard, the Helix would unravel, and that would be the Fat Lady’s aria for just about everything. We’d be left with another bloody singularity, then Big Bang II, and that is much too expensive a price for mankind’s inability to control its numbers. Do I make myself clear so far?”

Some of the nuns nodded. Others simply avoided God’s eyes.

“It was thus resolved that, as unpalatable as it might be, a deal would have to be struck with Yog-Sothoth the Unspeakable to begin to filter the human dead into a rented and previously underused section of his Black Dimension. Obviously it will not be too pleasant until those who first arrive make a few adaptations, but it will at least relieve the strain. And let’s face it; if you people will voluntarily elect to go to Gehenna, you’ll pretty much adapt to anything. The only stumbling block to this contingency plan was the energy drain created by the complex environments set up by some of you humans, and the quasi-divine status that was being claimed by some of the rulers of these environments. This directly challenged our own godhood and our ability to negotiate with Yog-Sothoth, who is a devious devil at the best of times. Without a negotiated settlement, the end result could be interdimensional territorial warfare, and all because of you damned irresponsible monkeys and your ridiculous birth rate. And if I ask you what an interdimensional conflict means, don’t nod your heads like a flock of bloody silly sheep, because you absolutely don’t have a clue and never will have.”

He paused once more and gestured to Jim, Doc, and Semple. “Fortunately, some of the worst of these phony gods have now been neutralized. We have to thank Semple McPherson, Jim Morrison, and Doc Holliday for their help, albeit unwitting, in neutralizing Anubis, the phony Moses, Aimee McPherson, and the recently departed Trixie, and also alerting Lucifer and Kali to their greater responsibilities, and perhaps even convincing the aliens that they should start minding their own business and stop writing obscenities in the waving fields of grain. In other sectors, we have also arranged, via similar agents, the downfall of three fake Hitlers, one ersatz Haile Selassie, a faux Hammurabis, two Alexander the Greats, a completely implausible Ivan the Terrible, and a gang of very nasty Essenes.”

Jim shook his head in bewilderment. “So we’re actually secret agents of God, are we? Even though it was a secret from us as well and we didn’t have a clue what we were doing?”

God smiled. “It can hardly be news that I move in mysterious ways.”

Jim shrugged. “I can live with the idea of being a divine secret agent.”

“And you can be justifiably proud of yourself.” God indicated that a small round of applause might be in order, and most obliged, although Aimee didn’t join in.

Quite the reverse, in fact. Aimee still looked a lot like the betrayed inamorata. “So, my Lord. Now that you’ve conspired with my sibling and these two notorious drunks to destroy the Heaven I took so many pains to create in your honor, what am I supposed to do?”

“You can do whatever you want, Aimee. I’ve stabilized the place so it won’t decay any further. If you want, you can bring back the Bambis and bluebirds and start a nice secular little Afterlife theme park along the lines of Disneyland. Anything you like, just as long as it has absolutely nothing to do with religion.”

“But I’ve devoted the whole of my life to religion.”

“And you’ve done very nicely out of it, but now you’re at the end of that particular road. You will have to try something else. I repeat, though, no religion, or terrible things will happen to you. Remember Ezekiel 25:17? I can still do that kind of stuff.” He turned away from Aimee. “Any more questions?”

Jim stretched his back. He suddenly felt very tired. “Does this mean our jobs are at an end? I mean me, Doc, and Semple?”

“Not only that, but, as I already said, you have the gratitude of the gods, and that’s no small thing.”

“So we can go where we like? No more secret missions?”

“You can go where you like, dear boy. Honky-tonking with Doc Holliday, or, if you’re looking for adventure, you might rejoin the Dionysian heroes, who I understand are planning a fresh assault on the Apollonians. Or, if total depravity is your craving, you could head out to Hatheg-Kla and howl and dance with the Great Ones. The choice is yours, although I did understand that you and Semple had started something.”

Doc had a much more simple and direct question. “But how do we get out of here?”

God laughed. “Now, that is a piece of cake.”

With an extended index finger, he described a circle on the ground and then took three paces back as a portal, rather like a giant manhole, opened in the earth. “With enough power to take you anywhere of your choosing, anyplace you are able to imagine.”

And with that, God picked up his cat and rose vertically into the air. He went straight up for about twenty feet and then moved horizontally across the lake toward the screen and, by some process of complex morphing, was absorbed into it. As God entered the picture, Hypodermic offered him a cheroot and, when God gratefully accepted it, also lit it for him. “Hawking?”

God nodded. “Hawking. Even he can’t be kept waiting forever.”

When the four very different gods walked away into the final fade, the background was suddenly visible. They were walking away down a road constructed from yellow brick.

“Sometimes I think Hawking’s smarter than any of us.”

“But he’s human.”

“Weird, isn’t it?”

As they diminished in size and their voices faded, the big screen sank slowly and majestically into the lake. A nun looked nervously at Doc. “Was that really God?”

Doc burst into wheezing laughter. “Sure thing, Sister. That was God, all right. No impostor could put on an act like that. The suit? The cat? The accent? The whole bit? Oh yes, sweetheart, you have just met with the Almighty.”

***

Doc was already peering down into the portal, staring at the shimmer of rainbow colors that seemed to descend for infinity. He had assumed that Semple and Jim were right behind him and was surprised when he looked back to see them still some distance away, in what, from the tenseness of their body language, looked to be a confrontational discussion. Aimee stood a few paces off, staring at the two of them. Without hearing what was being said, Doc instantly grasped the dynamic of the situation. Semple was the object in a tug of war and obligation between Jim and her sister. Bearing in mind how the two sisters had once been one, Doc could see that the conflict was virtually inevitable. He was tempted to go and join them, but decided it was a less-than-wise move. He couldn’t recall ever being thanked for intervening in a domestic dispute. Doc was also aware, though, that time was pressing. Most of the nuns had already checked out, some so disconcerted by the way things had panned out that they’d ripped off their habits and were stepping off into the portal clad in nothing more than bras and panties, ensuring themselves a provocative entrance when they arrived at wherever they had selected to go.

Doc decided that all he could do was attempt from a distance to force a resolution to what looked uncomfortably like an emotional impasse. “Not wishing to interrupt you young people, but I think we ought to make up our minds where we’re going to go and go there. This thing isn’t going to stay open and energized forever.”

Jim turned in his direction and shouted, “Hold on there a minute, Doc.”

“We don’t have much more than a minute. We have to go while the portal’s still hot.”

Jim exchanged more words with Semple and then hurried to where Doc was standing. “There’s a problem.”

“Haven’t we had enough problems?”

“This one’s a little different. Semple wants to stay here.”

Although Doc had already guessed this was the situation, he still looked around at the ruins of Heaven in feigned mystification. “Why the fuck should anyone want to stay here? There isn’t even a bar.”

“While the shit was going down-before God showed up-her sister extracted a promise from her to stay and help her fix up the place.”

“That’s ridiculous. She can’t hold Semple to that. God already stabilized the basics, and Aimee knows she can’t rebuild her Heaven the way it was. God’s going to drop the wrath on her from a great height if she does.”

“Semple gave her word. She feels obligated to stick around until Aimee’s back on her feet.”

“Then you don’t have a problem, boy. You and I will head out to Hatheg-Kla, and she can join us when she’s discharged her supposed obligation.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t as easy as that.”

“The business of the two of them just being one?”

“How did you know?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure.”

“Semple says Aimee all but came unglued while she was away.”

“And she’s afraid to be ever separated again?”

“That’s about it.”

“So it’s more of a permanent arrangement than just helping her get back on her feet.”

Jim nodded unhappily. “That is how it looks. I want Semple, but no way can I stay in this place for the duration.”

“If you shack up with Semple, with her sister as a third wheel, I give the romance three weeks, tops.”

“Aren’t you always telling me time’s relative?”

“It isn’t relative where relatives are concerned.”

“So what the fuck do I do, Doc?”

Doc slowly sighed. “I never found there was any percentage in giving advice to the lovelorn, but you do at least know one of the possible futures for the two of you.”

“The old house in the swamp?”

“What else?”

“I should tell Semple about that. Maybe it would stop her from making me feel like a bastard for not wanting to stay.”

Doc gave him a warning look. “That kind of vision shouldn’t be talked about, sport. It tempts destiny too directly.”

Jim and Doc both looked in the direction of Semple and Aimee. They were now in close discussion; Semple’s shoulders sagged as though she were close to resignation or defeat. “I’m going to tell her about the old house.”

Doc put a firm hand on Jim’s arm. “I really wouldn’t do that, Jim. It could set up all manner of destructive resonances.”

Jim’s expression was one of disbelieving suspicion. “What are you saying? That it’s like telling your birthday wish?”

“No, but if it helps you understand the concept, you can think of it that way. Anyway, she seems to be coming to you.”

Semple was walking quickly away from Aimee to where Jim and Doc were waiting. As she came close, it was clear that she was close to tears. Aimee was following more slowly, some distance behind her sister. Doc moved quickly to head her off and give Jim and Semple some privacy.

Semple faced Jim with a look of total desolation. “I have to stay with her. She’s just had all the supports kicked out from under her. God was her whole life, don’t forget. She could fade away to nothing.”

Jim shook his head impatiently. “Can’t you see she’s conning you?”

“I know that, but I’m frightened. I . . . ”

“What?”

“This time, I could be the one who fades.”

“You won’t, believe me.”

Semple looked more conflicted than Jim had ever seen her. He gestured around at the wrecked environment. “You don’t belong in this fucked-up place. You should be in Hatheg-Kla, with me. And all the other wild places.”

“No, Jim, it’s you that belongs in Hatheg-Kla. I have to be with Aimee.”

“Are you saying you won’t even come and join me?”

Semple suddenly clung to Jim. She held him for a moment and then stepped back. “Just go, Jim. Go with Doc right now. It’s hopeless. I know you’d stay with me if I begged you, but in the long run you couldn’t hack it. Aimee would drive you crazy. You’d get to hate me.”

“For fuck’s sake, woman. Forget about Aimee and come with me.”

“Just go, Jim. I made a promise.”

Jim hesitated for an Afterlife minute, then he turned, as though his brain had given up on the anguish of the choice and only the need to escape was driving him. That and a strange glimpse of the future. “So I’ll be seeing you.”

“I don’t think so . . . ”

Jim’s suddenly smiled. In that instant he trusted the vision of the old house as much as he trusted anything. “Oh yes, you will.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For once, I know something you don’t know.”

Before Semple could respond, Jim turned and walked to the portal. “Okay, Doc.”

Semple called after Jim as Doc dropped into the portal and dematerialized. “What do you mean, you know something I don’t know?”

Jim stepped into the portal himself. “You’ll see.”