Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

When the music stops, watch out!

White horses moving through the fog

White horses moving through the fog

Tall white horses moving through the

fog Pale horsemen following a red-eyed dog

The old man in the blue-green watered silk suit who called himself Long Time Robert Moore was playing the blues with an inspiration that far surpassed anything mortal. Moore sat in the musicians’ corner of Doc Holliday’s cantina, right beside the upright piano. Ruby, the resident piano player, remained on her stool, but merely watched him, her big-knuckled hands never so much as straying near the nicotine-stained keys. Robert Moore sat bent forward in a hard wood chair, his pearl-gray fedora pulled down so it cast a black-hole shadow where his eyes were supposed to be. Gold flashed on his right hand as he claw-picked with unerring precision. Silver flashed in his left as the stainless steel bottleneck rode the strings. More gold and a lone diamond flashed in his mouth as he sang. Moore had long since hit his stride, and every now and again he registered the fact by allowing himself a faint but knowing smile. He was now into that zone where voice and instrument dovetailed as one, interwoven twin factors of a single intent. The urgent slide guitar figure hummed and spun, chimed like a funeral toll, and then coiled back on itself with the surety of a striking snake. The sound resonated from the instrument’s metal body and commenced a journey that took it, rolling and tumbling, beyond the boundaries of the room, out through the doors and windows and missing walls of Doc’s half-completed cantina, to run echoing down the street and across the surrounding desert’s wild sounding board, finally to return as eerie, delayed reverberation.

Jim Morrison sat on the wooden sidewalk of another unfinished building across the street from Doc’s skeletal cantina, willing to idle for the while, sprawled against an upright; with a half-full whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his left hand, he listened with something close to awe to the music that Long Time Robert Moore was creating. Back on Earth, such purity of tone and sheer intensity of volume would have been impossible without major amplification. Here in the Afterlife, the majestic sound simply flowed from Moore’s acoustic National steel with no visible assistance. Music in the Afterlife could approach the magically sublime, as pickers, unencumbered by physical limitations, were free to indulge total audio fantasy. But the sound of Long Time Robert Moore still remained profoundly exceptional. Jim was glad he had Robert Moore to keep him entertained, as he settled into comfortable drunkenness. He was drunk enough not to want to negotiate the crowd that had now gathered in the cantina, but sufficiently comfortable that he was content to do nothing but slouch on the sidewalk and listen, eyes closed, his mind riding the chords.

Jim had noticed that it was almost impossibly easy to get drunk in Doc Holliday’s environment, and he wondered if that, and the magnificence of the music, had something to do with the unique quality of the air. The air in this land of Doc’s seemed unnaturally pure. Jim had noted this immediately when he’d emerged from the cantina. Although it still vibrated with the aftermath of the daytime desert heat, the atmosphere had an alpine crispness. It tasted as though it had been filtered, liquefied, distilled, and then reconstituted with an extra shot of oxygen. This was Antarctic air, Center for Disease Control, laboratory-conditioned air. Jim was surprised and a little amused by the care Doc took over his air. It hardly seemed in character for a man who smoked both opium and black, rank, rum-soaked Cuban cheroots; who deliberately maintained his near-terminal, blood-hacking tuberculosis as a signature of personal style. Or did it? Maybe virgin-pure air was Doc’s one concession to the physical.

How hard is that next page to turn?

How hard is that next page to turn?

How hard is that next page to turn?

How hard is the lesson to learn?

A purple night had fallen over Doc Holliday’s environment and the lazy indolence of the day had given way to a promise of dreaming urgency. As the light had dwindled and even the crimson and burning gold beyond the mesas at the horizon had eventually faded to black, the cantina and the whole tiny town had started to stir with expectations of the night to come. Lola had vanished for a while and then reappeared in a scarlet flamenco dress, matching shoes, and lipstick, with her hair in a mantilla. Lola’s red dress seemed to be the sign that the night’s festivities were open for business. Long Time Robert Moore had pushed back his hat and, with a sparkle of the diamond tooth that matched the wicked glint in his bloodshot eyes, opened the beat-up black case that contained the National steel. People Jim had never seen before converged on the cantina, hard-drinking men and women of the wild side who transformed the place from a sleepy afternoon refuge for wastrels to a juke joint so determinedly jumping that the eventual crescendo of what promised to be a cannonball night would bring either violent paranormal saturnalia or equally violent fistfights and gunplay.

Jim had been as determined as anyone else to go the dark distance and embrace anything that came his way. It was thus something of a surprise that he found himself flagging, taking himself out of the race to seek the sanctuary of a private bottle and a support to lean against. It might have been the air; it might have been a kind of delayed, second-time-around death lag, an aftereffect of his recent brush with the Great Double Helix. It might also have been the quantity of unidentified but effective drugs he had consumed for breakfast. Whatever the cause, Jim languished until the china-eyed black dog came up and spoke to him.

“Did you know that the electric chair at Parchman Penitentiary is painted bright banana yellow?”

Jim shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.”

The black dog nodded, its tongue lolling out. “Not many people do. It’s not something they publicize.”

Jim wasn’t at all surprised by the talking dog. He knew that people entered the Afterlife as dogs, horses, mules, and kittens, almost all of them able to talk. One guy had come through as a giant sea turtle the size of a Volkswagen; devoted Kafka enthusiasts sometimes faced life after death as giant bugs. The dog, however, had an odd look in its mismatched eyes. Jim decided his safest bet was to humor the animal. “I’d imagine it’d be something they’d want to keep quiet.”

The dog looked at him suspiciously. “Why should they want to do that?”

Jim hazily pondered this. “I don’t know. I guess I always figured that the electric chair ought to be a nice, dignified, judicial mahogany . . . mahogany with copper fittings, kinda like a coffin or the judge’s bench in the courtroom.”

The dog all but snapped. “Well, it ain’t. Least not at Parchman. You can take my word. It’s banana yellow. Layer upon layer of cheap banana yellow gloss enamel.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.” The dog changed the subject. “You waiting for Doc?”

Jim shook his head. “No, just waiting. Hardly even doing that.”

“Doc’s down at the opium den. He don’t usually come out until things have started hotting up in town.”

Jim looked up with interest. “An opium den?”

The dog showed its canine fangs; Jim took the grimace to be one of friendship rather than hostility. The dog pointed its nose to the other end of the town’s single main street. “Sure, down there, behind the laundry. Beside where the whorehouse used to be.”

Jim pushed himself away from the post. All through his mortal life he’d dreamed of going to a real old-fashioned opium den. He had almost made it to one in Paris, but his death had ruined that plan. “Are you kidding me? An opium den? A real, all-the-way, Chinese opium den with bunks and fans, and guys with pigtails cooking the pipes?”

The dog nodded. “The whole fortune cookie, plus John Coltrane and Miles Davis on the sound system. It’s run by a guy called Sun Yat.”

“No shit.”

The dog looked at Jim intently. “Before you ask any more questions, you could offer me a drink.”

Jim looked down his bottle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think dogs drank.”

“This one does.”

Jim frowned. “I never fed whiskey to a dog before. How exactly do I do it?”

“It’s easy. Just put the neck of the bottle in my mouth and start pouring. Just don’t pour too fast or I drool.”

The timing of the pouring process required more skill than Jim had imagined, and buying a dog a drink proved a messy and wasteful transaction. A considerable quantity of liquor ran out of the side of the dog’s mouth, dripping on the ground and on Jim’s leather pants. This in itself didn’t worry Jim overmuch. Plenty of booze had been spilled on that pair of pants. He just didn’t like to be thought of as a sloppy drunk, especially when he wasn’t the one doing the slopping. When he finally took the bottle from the dog’s mouth and wiped the booze and dog spit from his leathers, he saw the liquor level had gone down considerably. The dog braced its legs and shook itself, producing a fresh spray of saliva. Finally the dog swayed slightly and growled contentedly. “Damn, but I needed that.”

Jim had never seen a dog sway on its feet before. At the same moment, a lone rider moved slowly down the street, a strangely insubstantial figure wearing a ragged Civil War uniform, bowed over in the saddle of a pale and exhausted horse. Jim glanced quickly at the horse and rider and decided that he didn’t even want to speculate on their story. He turned back to the dog and gestured toward the opium den. “If I wanted to go to that place, what would I have to do?”

The dog was noticeably slurring now. “Well, you don’t just go walking in the front door. That’s for sure.”

“I need to be introduced to Sun Yat?”

“It’s not even as easy as that.”

“It isn’t?”

“The truth is that it’s all down to Doc’s whim. And you better believe me, Doc has his whims.”

Jim sighed. “I’d sure like to get me some of that opium time. I could handle laying in the rack and just drifting and dreaming.”

The dog grinned. “I heard that Doc drifts all the way back to Earth in his opium dreams.”

Jim nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed? I really could handle some of that.”

The dog wasn’t exactly encouraging. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If Doc likes you, you’ll get an invite. If he don’t, you won’t be around long enough to need one.”

Jim didn’t want to hear what happened to people to whom Doc took a dislike, so he turned the direction of the conversation a couple of points sideways. “You said Sun Yat’s place was next to where the whorehouse used to be?”

“That’s right.”

“So what happened to the whorehouse?”

The dog laughed. “Oh, the house is still there. It’s the whores that are gone. They all got religion and moved on. You know what whores are like when they get religion. Some say it’s because they spend too much of their working life staring up at Heaven.”

Jim didn’t know what whores were like when they got religion. All the whores he could remember had pretty much remained whores, except the ones who switched careers to become junkies, but he let it pass. “So where did they go?”

The dog shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Rumor was that they split to some holier-than-thou ectosector run by this broad calling herself Sister Aimee.”

“Sister Aimee?”

“That’s what I heard. Seems she’s got a place set up way down yonder, like some Sunday school heaven.”

Jim thought about this. “Didn’t Doc kinda take it amiss?”

The dog frowned. “Why should Doc worry?”

“Didn’t he create the whores in the first place?”

The dog looked at Jim as though he were an idiot. “Hell, no. Doc didn’t create too much of this.”

Jim was surprised. “He didn’t?”

“Well, I mean, he made the buildings and stuff, but you can see how much trouble he took with those. Dr. Caligari lavished more care on his cabinet.”

Jim looked around. Most of the buildings were unfinished in some way, leaning on each other at disconcerted angles.

“Goddamned things are held together with nothing more than faith and baling wire,” the dog continued. “I gotta tell you, I don’t even feel safe pissing on them when Doc’s not paying attention. It’s a miracle they make it from one day to the next, but Doc doesn’t exactly cotton to making things too solid.”

“But what about the people?”

“Doc didn’t make the people.”

Jim was having trouble getting a handle on what the dog was saying. “No?”

“He didn’t make you, did he?”

Jim was still confused. “No, but I assumed-”

The dog cut him off. “Don’t come around here assuming, boy. This is not a place to be making assumptions. Doc strongly disapproves of dreaming up people just to act as extras in the fantasy. It’s like he always says, ‘If you can’t attract a population of real folk, then fuck you.’ Doc thinks cookie-cutter populations tempt the psychos and sadists.”

“So how did all these people get here?”

The dog looked at him impatiently. “Listen, if I gotta be the goddamned talking guidebook, you could at least give me another drink.”

Jim held up the bottle. Little more than an inch and a half of whiskey left in it. He looked at the dog. “If I give you a drink, it’ll kill the bottle. You fucking spill half of it.”

“So you get up and go over to the cantina and get another one. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is I’m not sure I can walk.”

The dog regarded him bleakly. “Of course you can walk. You just don’t want to make the effort.”

The dog’s attitude was starting to piss Jim off. “So why don’t you go and get your own bottle? You’ve got four fucking legs.”

It seemed that Jim was beginning to piss the dog off, too. Its voice took on an aggrieved snarl. “It’s hard to carry a fucking bottle when all you’ve got is paws.”

Jim didn’t need to be snarled at by a damned alcoholic dog. “Maybe you should hang a barrel of cognac around your neck like a fucking St. Bernard.”

The dog bared its teeth at Jim in what amounted to a snarl. “Fuck you. I’ll go someplace where the drunks are a bit more hospitable.”

For a moment, Jim thought the dog was about to bite him and he wondered how the hell he should deal with that. Could you actually punch out a dog? Then the dog started to walk away. Jim realized he’d probably made an error in good manners. He called after the dog. “Hey, wait up. You can have the last of the booze.”

The dog turned and looked at him with an expression of utter canine contempt. “Keep your fucking booze. I got friends, if you know what I mean.” And with that ambiguous parting shot, it trotted off in the direction of the cantina.

Jim watched as the dog vanished inside the cantina. He half expected it to reemerge a few moments later, followed by an entire pack of talking dogs intent on ripping him to shreds in canine retribution for the disrespect that he had afforded one of their number. Although Jim had never actually witnessed or even heard a firsthand account of such an occurrence, a rumor did exist in the Afterlife that, should you be torn apart by dogs, blown up, or otherwise have your quasi-corporate body fragmented into multiple pieces, you were in a lot of trouble. The essential core of one’s being, the part that some called the soul, would almost certainly return to the pod; that wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that the other bits might actually attempt to reconstitute themselves with often grotesque and monstrous results, and even come looking for you.

He struggled to his feet and stood waiting, but when, after a reasonable passage of time, no vengeful dog crew snarled from the cantina, Jim sat back down again and resumed his previous indolence. Long Time Robert Moore had started in on another tune, and Jim simply relaxed, closed his eyes, and let the sound wash over him.

If I wake tomorrow

I ain’t guessing where I’ll be

Maybe in some other time

Maybe in misery

Jim’s eyes remained closed, until a second voice roused him. Someone else seemed bent on breaking in on his precious internal privacy. He looked up and discovered a bulky man wearing a dashiki, a riot of red gold and green, with his hair puffballed out in a vast Afro. The man was standing over him, grinning down with a mouthful of jewel-encrusted teeth that put Long Time Robert Moore’s lone diamond to diminutive shame. “I’m Saladeen.”

Jim nodded. “Saladeen?”

“Right?”

Jim found it hard to drag his eyes away from the gem-filled bridgework, but he extended a tentative hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Saladeen grasped the offered hand, fortunately with no fancy ritual handshake. “You Jim Morrison, ain’t you?”

Jim tensed and slowly drew his legs up protectively, in readiness to flee or fight as circumstances might dictate. “I was last time I looked.”

“I saw you one time.”

Jim relaxed slightly. Apparently he didn’t owe Saladeen money and he hadn’t done anything terrible to his sister. He raised a neutral eyebrow. “You did?”

“I did. It was in Oakland in 1968. Of course, you didn’t see me. You was up on the bandstand posing in the spotlight, I was down in the crowd selling loose joints and nickel bags.”

“I hope you enjoyed the show.”

“I thought you were a crazy motherfucker.”

Jim decided to accept that as a compliment. He eased himself out of fight-or-flight mode and raised his bottle. “Well, thanks. I’d offer you a drink, but this bottle’s all but dead.”

Saladeen shook his head. “I’m okay for the moment. Besides, I’ve got my own euthanasia.” So saying, he pulled a fat, double-corona, three-paper reefer from the folds of his dashiki, and gestured to the sidewalk next to Jim. “You mind if I take the weight off? I ain’t invading your space or nothing, am I?”

Jim raised an invitational arm. “Help yourself, man. I got all the space I need.”

Saladeen lowered his bulk to the wooden sidewalk. “I see that crazy fucking Euclid was hustling you for drinks.”

Jim was puzzled. Had he missed something? “Euclid?”

“The dog you were talking to.”

“That’s Euclid?”

“That’s what he calls himself.”

“Euclid the mathematician?”

Saladeen lit the imposing joint by simply igniting his index finger. For a moment his Afro was so wreathed in smoke that the two were almost a single cloud. “Fuck no, Euclid the dog, man. Euclid the mathematician has to be out somewhere with Einstein and Stephen Hawking by now, helping run the universe.”

“He seemed kind of put out when the bottle started to run dry.”

“Euclid’s kinda short on good manners. Mostly folks let him slide, though, on account of he was executed and all.”

The conversation seemed to be making odd jumps and Jim attempted to slow things down enough for them to make at least minimal sense. “The dog was executed?”

“You think he was a dog in his mortal life?”

“No, but . . . ”

Saladeen passed Jim the joint. “He told you the electric chair in Parchman was banana-colored, am I right?”

Jim inhaled deeply and immediately felt a little solarized at the edges. “Yeah, that’s right. It was his opening line.”

“So how do you think he knew that?”

“I don’t question it. I was talking to a drunken, crazy-looking dog.”

Saladeen’s smile faded. “You got some kinda prejudice against dogs? You maybe think you’re better than a dog?”

Jim wasn’t going to go along with this one. He did his best to avoid conflicts, but the guy was going too far. He passed back the joint. “You may not believe this, but there are times when I really do think I’m better than a dog. I mean, you won’t ever see me catching Frisbees in my teeth.”

Again Jim tensed slightly in anticipation of a possible negative reaction. To his surprise, Saladeen merely laughed. “So you ain’t buying my line of bullshit, huh?”

Jim shook his head. “Not tonight.”

The gems in Saladeen’s teeth flashed in the lights from the cantina. “Just checking, if you know what I mean.”

Inside, Long Time Robert Moore was still rocking the joint.

If I wake tomorrow

I ain’t guessing where I’ll be

Saladeen glanced at Jim. “Cat sings like a motherfucker, don’t he?”

Jim nodded. “He surely does.”

“I don’t figure that his real name’s no Robert Moore.”

“No?”

“You just think about who he sounds like.”

Jim thought about this, but he didn’t feel that any answer was required right there and then. Particularly as Saladeen had already turned the discussion back to the subject of the black dog. “If you’d met Euclid back in the world, back when he was a human, it’s likely you’d still have thought you were better than him.”

“Yeah?”

Saladeen nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah.”

“Low?”

“Real low.”

“How low?”

“Low motherfucker. A piece of sorry-assed white trash that went by the name of Wayne Stanley Caxton. Shot three folks dead in a fucked-up, thirty-five-dollar armed robbery at a corner grocery in Tunica, Mississippi. I figure it was no loss to the world when they fried him. Some of the shit must’ve gotten through to him, though. If he come out of the pod as a dog, motherfucker must have developed some sense of shame.”

“You think so?”

“Lot of folks here got themselves executed. Doc’s real good about letting them settle in his area. Figure it’s because he came close enough to getting hung himself a couple of times. When you get yourself executed, man, you hit the pod feeling about as lowdown and abject as it’s possible to get. A lot of the worst of them just wraith out and become haunts and night creepers. Particularly the serial killers and sex butchers. By the time you make it to the priest and governor and the thirteen steps to the Great Divide, you’re thinking that you don’t got any other option. The man got the system set up so you be feeling like an all-time fucking wretch when they strap you in the chair or the gas chamber or onto the gurney for the lethal jolt. Think about it. You spend years on death row. Eight, nine, ten years, man. Twisting and turning, appealing and petitioning, with everyone telling you that you’ve sunk so low you no longer deserve to live. So, when you land in the Great Double Helix and all them dreams come to you in the pod, they ain’t about you going into the Afterlife as King of the fucking World, I can tell you.”

“You’d know about that, bro?”

“Is that a discreet way of asking me if I was fried myself?”

Jim kept a perfectly straight face. “About as discreet as I could put it.”

“Well, the answer is no. I didn’t go to the chair or the gas chamber or the lethal injection, or even a Utah firing squad or a French guillotine. Me, I was shot by a fucking cop. A small-town, red-necked, Coors-beer, pig son of a bitch who thought he’d pulled over Eldridge Cleaver or some shit. November tenth, 1972, Barstow, California at nine-seventeen in the evening. Just trying to get myself the fuck away from L.A.”

“I guess that didn’t make you feel so good, either.”

“I’m telling you, man. I came out of that pod as mean as hell. After a while, though, when I saw how things were, I started figuring that I was probably lucky.”

“How did you figure that?”

“I never had to trip on no death row contemplation, bro. Or no terminal cancer ward, for that matter. And for those mercies I was profoundly grateful, you know what I’m saying? If you gotta go at the hands of the man, you best make it fast and furious.”

The joint was now down to a roach; Saladeen nipped off the hot coal with a callused thumbnail and ate what remained. “That’s maybe why Doc lets them hole up here. He didn’t go no fast and furious. He did his own share of twisting and turning on them TB blues before he passed over. Fast and furious be the only route.”

Jim nodded. “I can see that.”

“Lee Oswald, man. That’s the only way to go. You’re walking through the door into that parking garage, man. Nothing on your mind except how the fuck are you going to get out of this deep shit and then BAM! Jack Ruby with his hat on and you gone before you even know it, homes. No ten years of lawyers and thinking about it.”

After that, Jim found himself at a stoned loss for words. There was really nothing to say, and for long minutes the two men sat in silence until Saladeen spoke again. “He was here for a while, you know?”

“Who was?”

“Lee Oswald.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I swear. A wandering soul wandering through. He was calling himself Harvey Hydell, and he’d taken on the physical form of Leon Trotsky, but most everyone knew. And those that didn’t figured it out in time.”

“Leon Trotsky? Are you jerking me around?”

Saladeen looked angry. “Leon fucking Trotsky. Leader of the motherfucker Red Army, purged by Stalin, assassinated 1940, Mexico City. What’s the matter, jerkoff? You think I don’t know what Leon Trotsky look like? You think I’m stupid or something?”

Jim held up a hand. “Just slow down here, okay? Don’t get so fucking hair-trigger on me. I was just thinking what a weird choice it was to look like Leon Trotsky. I mean, those fucking glasses and the beard and the sticking-up hair. Jesus Christ.”

Saladeen shrugged. “I guess the motherfucker wasn’t aiming for handsome. You know what I mean? Being a paradox wrapped in an enigma got to be some burden to bear. Can’t leave you too much time to be doing handsome, yo?”

After Saladeen’s sudden flash of temper, Jim thoroughly expected him to get up and take his leave after this statement, but the big man surprised Jim by remaining exactly where he was. He didn’t speak for a while and then he grinned sheepishly. “Listen, I-”

Jim shook his head. “No big thing.”

Saladeen turned away, staring off down the street and across the desert. “I guess I still ain’t gotten over being mad at-” He abruptly stopped and his back stiffened. “Uh-oh.”

Jim quickly turned. “What?”

“Uh-oh.”

This second uh-oh was one of the least encouraging uh-ohs that Jim ever remembered hearing. Saladeen continued to peer out into the desert. “I think we may have a problem yonder.”

Jim looked where he was looking. A bright blue-white light was zigzagging across the desert, laid low to the ground but, as far as Jim could tell, making for the town. Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What is that?”

Saladeen ignored him as he watched the light. It seemed to be coming nearer. He cursed slowly under his breath. “Shee-it.”

Jim was starting to become a little alarmed. “So what is it?”

Saladeen scowled. “It could be anything. There’s always lights buzzing about in the desert. Could just be random leak-through. Or it could be a harbinger.”

“A harbinger of what?”

Saladeen’s scowled deepened. “That’s always the tricky part with harbingers.”

***

The hard, rocky, and already uneven ground of Golgotha was now so littered with human skulls and bones that it was all but impossible to walk without crunching them underfoot. Semple’s high heels constantly threatened to twist out from under her, and she was beginning to profoundly regret that she had insisted that the meeting be held in this accursed place. To deliberately irritate Aimee, Semple had chosen a suit in guardsman red, an eighties-style Dynasty-retro number with a short and very tight skirt and a flounced jacket with enormous shoulders. The ensemble was completed by matching pillbox hat and veil, and the already-mentioned shoes with their impractical heels. Aimee, on the other hand, had dressed in blue for their meeting, pumping her image of innocence and purity on this occasion with shades of the Virgin Mary. She even had a faint rainbow halo hovering above her head. Aimee definitely seemed to be in the process of making the transition from the loyally devout to the independently divine; plus the simple fact of having been organized enough to arrive first allowed her to establish her high ground and spare herself the need to stumble over the strewn bones in front of an audience. In this respect, Semple had definitely been aced out in the current round of the struggle.

Prior to the complete separation of herself and Aimee, the fiction had always been that the horror landscape of Golgotha was a creation of Semple’s. She was the dark half. Who else could bring into being such a vivid tableau of desolation, suffering, and mortal misery? Semple, however, had repeatedly denied this. She had no memory of doing any such thing. Certainly, the necessary evil lurked in her heart, but the grisly brutality of Golgotha, with its multiple crucifixions and its stark, wind-scorched terrain, just wasn’t Semple’s style. Golgotha was primitive, stinking, and foul, and her signature wasn’t on any part of it.

After a long time, Aimee had all but managed to convince her that she must have brought the ghastly location into being quite unconsciously, in a dream or when she was occupied with something else. Aimee had reasoned that it must be the product of a deeply buried nastiness from the lower murk of Semple’s tainted psyche. It was only after the separation had become absolute, and Golgotha had not only remained but also extended itself, that the truth had finally to be faced. Golgotha had nothing to do with Semple. It had grown and continued to grow from some flaw of corruption in Aimee’s soul. Semple might be the dark half, but Aimee wasn’t without her own secret reservoirs of shadow. From Semple’s perspective, the only disturbing factor in the revelation was that, if Aimee wasn’t as pristine and perfect as she pretended, it might also indicate that Semple herself wasn’t all bad. At some point in the future, an unanticipated inner virtue might rise up and betray her at the worst possible moment.

Once the truth was out, Semple had taken every opportunity to remind Aimee of the embarrassing fact that Golgotha was entirely hers. That was why Semple had insisted that they meet there, but now it looked as if instead of Semple rubbing Aimee’s nose in the wart on her psyche, she was about to twist, distastrously, one or both of her own ankles. Semple’s scarlet alligator spike crunched down on a partial human rib cage and she stumbled badly. She had to take three quick steps sideways to avoid falling, while, to her total chagrin, Aimee watched with an amused smile and the crew of nuns that flanked her hid their faces in the wimples of their white habits and tittered behind their hands.

“Are you drunk, sibling dear?”

Semple regained her balance and glared at her sister. “No, I’m not drunk. It’s becoming impossible to walk in this place. Couldn’t you have someone clean it up? Or at least clear some paths through the bones?”

“Perhaps it’s the extreme impracticality of your footwear?”

This remark drew a fresh burst of smothered sniggering from the nuns, and Semple wished that she had the time to create a dozen or so Mongol tribesmen or Russian soldiers from World War II. They would make short work of those bitches. “If you have to have this accursed place, you could at least make some effort to maintain it. If they aren’t cleared out soon, the damned bones will start piling up in drifts. Where do you think you are? Pol Pot’s Cambodia?”

Aimee glanced at one of the nuns. “Make a note, my dear. The Place of Skulls needs to be tidied up.”

The nun nodded and produced a small notebook and silver pencil to take down the memo. Semple had heard that both the retinue of nuns and also the gaggle of women dressed in torn and filthy sackcloth, the ones with the wild hair and mad staring eyes, who clustered at the foot of the crosses watching the agonies of the gasping, groaning victims with ugly relish, had previously worked as prostitutes in the notorious ectosector of the degenerate ex-dentist and hired killer called John Holliday. They were, however, a recent addition to Aimee’s human menagerie, arriving well after Semple had gone her own way, so she could not be completely sure of the story’s veracity.

Aimee turned her attention back to Semple. “Why don’t you come closer, my dear?”

Semple shook her head. “I think I’ll stay right here.” Another attempt to stumble across the field of dry bones would only risk further humiliation and even injury.

Aimee smiled indulgently. “So have you decided to find me my poet?”

Semple nodded. “Yes, I have.”

Aimee looked surprised. “Just like that? No conditions? No discussion? No negotiating points?”

“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”

Now the two sisters faced each other across a space of about fifteen feet. All around them, a forest of crosses, some empty, some bearing a roped and nailed occupant, reared against the angry red sky and the roiling purple clouds like diseased and leafless trees. Since they were already dead, the victims of Golgotha never actually died, but at some point in their torture, often after a number of days of excruciating pain, they simply vanished. The suffering became too much for them and they vibrated out and took the wind route back to the pod. The strange part of it all was that no real reason existed for these individuals to suffer at all. In theory, they could have made their exit before they even reached the cross, or the first nail was driven into their feet or hands. The obvious inference was that those who went along with their own quasi-executions were either advanced masochists, guilt-racked religious fanatics, or insanely locked into the fantasy.

Another peculiar consideration was that the majority of those who underwent crucifixion were genuine entities and not Aimee’s tame creations. The unfortunates were drawn from the numbers of odd spirits who had trouble assuming an identity and personality of their own in the Afterlife and gravitated to the constructs of others, in this case Aimee’s personal Heaven. By far the greater percentage of these sad arrivals caused no problems in Heaven, blending easily with the manufactured angels and cherubs. The victims on the crosses-all but a couple of exceptions of the male gender-must have transgressed in some way and were paying the price. Semple understood that the malefactors and heretics were usually fingered by one or another of the ex-prostitute nuns, who had the dual function of acting as Aimee’s spy net and ideological secret police. As the saying went, there was nothing more righteously vindictive than a reformed whore. The only thing that remained a total mystery to Semple was where the constantly increasing numbers of bones were coming from.

Aimee, having arranged to be slightly farther up the sere, central hill of Golgotha, was able to talk down to her sister with a far-fromwarranted superiority. “So when do you intend starting out on your quest?”

“I thought I’d go right now.”

Aimee looked surprised. “Right now?”

Semple nodded. “That’s right. Unless you can think of any reason to delay.”

“I can think of none. Where are you intending to commence your search?”

“I was going to travel directly to Necropolis.”

Aimee frowned. “Necropolis? Is that wise?”

“It’s the closest confluence.”

“Necropolis is an evil place. Old and evil and made worse by the passage of time. I heard there were over a million souls there, all subject to the will of one being who claims to be the god Anubis and is reputed to be the personification of iniquity.”

Semple smiled annoyingly. “I thought it would be my kind of place.”

“You could encounter many strange things in Necropolis.”

A troop of small black monkeys with bald white faces like little old men was rooting through the litter of bones and tossing them around as though attempting a miniature re-creation of the prologue of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. At the mention of the word “Necropolis,” however, they stopped what they were doing and appeared to settle down to listen to the conversation. Semple noted that animals and birds were a new addition, and wondered what fresh weirdness might be eating at the underside of her sister’s mind. Along with the monkeys, a flock of vultures flapped and squabbled between the crosses, rats scurried through the lower levels of the bone piles, and skinny yellow dogs snarled and scavenged. “Like it’s so totally normal around here?”

“Don’t take Anubis too lightly. I understand he runs a brutally sophisticated police state.”

Semple glanced at Aimee’s gang of nuns but didn’t comment on their homegrown secret-police tactics. “I have quite a rep as a funster myself. I don’t see why I should be afraid of any jackal-headed Egyptian death god. Besides, he’s almost certain to be a phony.”

“Phony or not, I’ve also heard he encourages cannibalism.”

Semple looked hard at her sister. The monkeys continued to watch intently. “Does something about my leaving worry you? Are you trying to put me off?”

“Of course not. Why should it?” Once again Aimee’s answer wasn’t ringing true. “Are you concerned that putting distance between us will create some kind of problem?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“I hadn’t even considered it.”

“You hadn’t?”

“No, I hadn’t.”

Semple shrugged. “It did occur to me that a separation might have an effect on us.”

“What kind of effect?”

Semple suddenly realized that her observation had been more accurate than she had imagined. “I don’t know. A stretching of the bonds and connections between us might in some way weaken or diminish us.”

Aimee was starting to look a little frightened. “Do you think it will?”

“I don’t know. It might.”

“But you’ll take that chance?”

“You want your poet, don’t you?”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“Then I have to leave. It had to happen sooner or later. We can’t remain joined by an invisible umbilical for all eternity.”

“I know that.”

“Particularly if you have plans to replace God.”

Aimee took a step back and looked around quickly at her entourage of nuns. “I don’t have plans to replace God. That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“It’s true, though.”

“It’s blasphemous.”

“That doesn’t mean that it’s not true.”

“But it’s not true.”

Semple gestured to the nuns surrounding her sister. “You want to watch out for those bitches, Aimee. Like Winston Churchill used to say about the Germans, they’re either at your feet or at your throat.” She glanced up at the nearest cross in clear warning. “Don’t make any wrong moves, sister, or they’ll have you nailed to the wood.”

Semple gave Aimee points for speed of recovery. She gathered her attitude, and was once again sweet and superior. “Is that your parting thought?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you intend to leave from here?”

Semple forced a grin. She was a little scared, too, but the nonchalant swashbuckler in her would never allow her to admit it. “Here’s as good a place as any to vibe away. No point in waiting around.”

“You’ll wind-walk directly to Necropolis?”

“It’s big enough. I doubt I can miss it. Will you and your crew of nuns help energize me?”

Aimee nodded. “Of course.”

Semple indicated that Aimee and her nuns should form a circle around her, with Aimee directly facing her. As the nuns started to comply, the victim on one of the nearby crosses suddenly spoke. He was a swarthy man, only recently nailed in place, with fresh blood still running from his feet and palms. He addressed himself to Semple. “She’s right, you know. There are cannibals in Necropolis. I should know. I was one. That’s why I came here. To find salvation. It was-”

“You will remain silent!” He was cut off by one of the nuns breaking from the forming circle and rushing, screaming, at the unfortunate man. “No one asked you to speak! How dare you speak?” She reached the foot of the cross and flailed unmercifully at him with a heavy wooden rosary. Fortunately for him, the nun was comparatively short and even with the rosary she was able to land blows only on his legs and feet. Aimee quickly beckoned her back to the circle, and then glanced at Semple. “Are you ready?”

“I suppose so.” The truth was she was having a little difficulty maintaining appearances. The crucified man’s testimony had unnerved her more than she cared to admit. She might have had a renegade imagination and been fascinated by advanced vice, but Semple was well aware that eating people was fundamentally wrong.

The nuns raised their arms and pointed at Semple. Energy flowed from their fingertips directly to her, increasing in strength as Aimee and the nuns locked and focused their concentration. Semple’s exterior began to vibrate. The landscape started to waver. She took a final look at Aimee. “I shall return with your poet.”

Semple McPherson filled her mind with an image of Necropolis and vanished from her sister’s Heaven.

***

The light was so intense that Jim felt as though hard radiation were coursing through his very being. The crisp air crackled and hummed and Jim could smell sudden whiffs of highly charged ozone. The walls of the incomplete buildings in Doc Holliday’s tiny township vibrated with eerie, sympathetic resonances, and tremors shook the ground under his feet. Jim all but staggered under the assault on his senses. Even his taste buds were registering something bizarre and metallic. The roughly spherical maelstrom of light had made three fast passes, about four feet off the ground, up and down the street, from the desert approaches all the way to Sun Yat’s opium den and back again. Then it had come to an abrupt stop right by the cantina, and right by where Jim and Saladeen, now on their feet and, in Jim’s case, suddenly sober, were wondering what the hell was going to happen next. When the light halted, Long Time Robert Moore also stopped playing, and to Jim that was nothing but an ill omen.

The light was both a single entity and a composite of billions of tiny brilliant points, pulsing, revolving, and dancing, like the concentration of stars at the core of some violent galactic spiral. The overall effect was of blinding white, but if one dared to look for more than a moment, all the colors of the spectrum were present within it. Jim and Saladeen stood side by side, arms raised to cover their already tightly shut eyes. After a moment Jim sneaked a quick peek, but even that was enough to risk a retinal burn.

The light remained stationary for maybe a minute, although to Jim it seemed one hell of a lot longer. He began to fear, even though he felt no actual heat, that his clothes would start smoldering, that his exposed skin would be fried to a purple crisp. To Jim this looked like the kind of light that could put a bend in the universe and that might be equally capable of vaporizing his soul. Then, as he was on the verge of cutting and running, the awful light began to fade. Jim slowly lowered his arm as it dimmed, and the first thing he saw, among the lingering confusion of afterimages, was a group of three indistinct but apparently human figures at the heart of the glow.

Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What the fuck?”

But Saladeen had turned away, his eyes still shut. “No!”

“What?”

“NO!”

Saladeen’s explosive response took Jim completely by surprise. The man was plainly terrified, something so out of character that it left Jim at a total loss. He looked back at the light and at the three figures. The light was little more than a dying ripple of pale stars, all but gone, and now he could see the figures as they really were. And that immediately posed the question of what they really were. Humanoid, but this clearer inspection raised major doubts that they were strictly human, more like characters from a tropical nightmare. All three stood close to nine feet tall, carrying with them an air of the unnatural. The central one was a statuesque female with ebony skin, wearing a floor-length robe that, as far as Jim could tell, was tailored from sheets of frozen flame. Her head was crowned by a massive headdress of spun gold and ostrich plumes.

To her right stood an impossibly skinny male, emaciated to the point of being scarcely more than a stick figure, dressed in formal evening wear, white tie and tails and a stovepipe hat so elongated and extended that it brought his overall height to well over eleven feet. The pale face below the hat was a naked skull, molded from some virgin-white material akin to fine porcelain. The third figure was also male, but more robust, decked out like the Fourth of July in a grandiose military uniform somewhere on the scale between Hermann Goering and Michael Jackson. The primary motif among his massed insignia was a jagged lightning bolt not unlike the flash on the uniform of Captain Marvel, Jr., or Elvis Presley’s self-designed TCB logo. Jim might easily have judged this third figure as nothing more than an overdressed clown, right up to the moment that he saw the face. It was about as clownish as the face of Idi Amin, a face quite capable of talking to the severed heads of its victims for hours at a stretch, a face that looked able to sustain an immortal fury well beyond any reasonable limit.

As Jim wondered about the nature and purpose of this triple apparition, a voice inside his head, possibly some dislocated memory from the right brain, surprised him with at least half the answer. “The woman is Danbhalah La Flambeau, Queen of the Persisting Fire. The thin one is Guede Docteur Piqures, that’s Dr. Hypodermic in English. He is the ruling spirit of narcotics and those addicted to them. You’ve had dealings with him before, although you won’t remember. The one in the uniform is Baron Tonnerre, the Baron Thunder, the incarnate wrath of the gods. They are all middle-echelon Mysteres from the Voodoo pantheon. They are very old and very cold and they are absolutely real, not a part of some ambitious stiff’s fantasy. They’re also very dangerous and you’d be well advised not to fuck with them.”

Almost as though he could hear the message in Jim’s brain, Saladeen urgently grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t be looking at them, man! Just don’t be looking at them!” Saladeen’s eyes were still tightly shut, his head turned away even while he pleaded with Jim. “They can mount you and ride you. They can use you up until there’s nothing left. Don’t let them catch you looking at them, man. They carry the keys to the Masterlock.”

But it was too late for Jim. He had looked and the three Mysteres had seen him looking. As one, they turned and faced him. The light had now completely dissipated to the point that not a single tiny star remained. Now the Mysteres were solid figures, glowing with a dead-fish shimmer. Their feet did set off tiny flashes of static, though, when they moved, as if they still carried a residual charge left by the radiation. Saladeen dropped to his knees, muttering incoherently. By far the worst feature of the three Mysteres, though, was their eyes. Even from a distance, Jim could see those eyes far more clearly than he would ever have desired. The three pairs of eyes, even by the standards of the Afterlife, had no place in any human quadrant of either space or time. They were terrible windows to somewhere else, a place that Jim would never want to visit, let alone inhabit.

Dr. Hypodermic suddenly moved in a flurry of pale blue static. He was coming toward Jim, and Jim’s insides turned to a very mortal ice water. In the normal course of events, the worst that could happen to one in the Afterlife was to be sent back to a pod on the Great Double Helix without passing Go. Who knew what a Voodoo Mystere could do to you, if he caught you looking at him and took a mind to mess you up? Mercifully, Danbhalah La Flambeau gestured to Dr. Hypodermic and he halted and turned away.

At the same time, the sound of a door slamming echoed from somewhere near Sun Yat’s, and Doc Holliday came slowly but determinedly around the side of the building and down the street. The Voodoo gods shifted to face him. Distracted from Jim, they stood waiting for Doc while Jim breathed a sigh of temporary relief. It was Doc’s town; let him deal with this terrifying trio. Maybe he was prepared for tourists from the Sinister Beyond. Certainly Doc didn’t seem fazed by them. He showed no signs of hurry. His ruffled shirt, partially unbuttoned, seemed to have been hastily tucked in his black pants. A certain unsteadiness in his step suggested he was at least half in the opium bag.

The arrival of Doc also appeared to reassure Saladeen. He got slowly to his feet, but kept his eyes firmly fixed on the ground as he muttered a little shamefacedly to Jim, “I guess I just lost it.”

Jim nodded. “I was close myself.”

“This shit goes deep, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, but Doc seems to be handling them.”

“Doc’s seen it all. Either here or in his dreams. Of course, Doc’s True Bad himself.”

Jim wasn’t quite ready to believe that Doc was on a par with Voodoo gods. “Not like those things.”

“No, not like those things, but he got his depths.”

Indeed, Doc was now in conversation with the queen, the doctor, and the baron, seeming not even slightly intimidated by their size or demeanor. Doc’s voice was soft and a little slurred and Jim couldn’t make out what he was saying. The Mysteres spoke in Haitian French patois, which Jim was absolutely unable to understand. What he didn’t like, however, was the way Doc and the Mysteres kept glancing in his direction as they conferred.

Saladeen shifted uncomfortably. “I hate to say this, homes, but I think you’ve been noticed.”

Jim nodded worriedly. “I fear you’re right.”

Doc now appeared to be indicating to La Flambeau, Hypodermic, and Tonnerre that it might be a good idea to continue their conversation inside the cantina rather than out on the street. The doctor and the baron seemed to think otherwise, but Danbhalah La Flambeau took control and set off with Doc toward the entrance of the cantina. After a moment’s hesitation, the two gods reluctantly followed. An intriguing logistics problem immediately presented itself. The doorway of the cantina afforded no more than seven feet of clearance, and Jim wondered how La Flambeau would negotiate it. Would she stoop down or what? Jim didn’t think so, and, in confirmation, a section of the wall above the door dematerialized to permit her a suitably dignified entrance. As soon as she passed through, the piece of wall reappeared.

Hypodermic and Tonnerre had also mounted the steps, but instead of going straight inside, the two of them stopped and turned. They treated Jim to a long look before continuing into the cantina, and in the core of Jim’s soul, the ice water rushed back with a vengeance.

***

As her sister glowed briefly, distorted, and vanished, Aimee McPherson felt a sudden wave of weariness and misgiving sweep over her. Semple was gone and there was no knowing when she might return and with what. She had asked her sister to seek out a poet, a creative force to help her expand and complete her Heaven, but it was anyone’s guess what adaptations Semple might make along the way, what complications she might add to the basic plan. A degree of malicious intent had to be figured into any equation of which Semple was a part, and possibly a measure of capricious improvisation. Aimee also felt suddenly very lonely. Semple might be difficult, even dangerous, but she had always been there, all through their life on Earth and clear into this very unsatisfactory Afterlife. She truly wondered how, now that Semple was no longer close at hand, she would fare without her. She knew all the stories about twins, Siamese or otherwise, and how, following the death or removal of one, the other would also terminally languish. She and Semple weren’t exactly twins. In fact, they were closer than that. They were two separated halves of a single whole, and that posed a different set of problems.

She looked around Golgotha. Sweet Jesus, how she hated it. If it was at all possible, she never wanted to set foot in the Place of Skulls again. She turned to the entourage of nuns with a sigh. “Let’s get out of here and go about our righteous business.”

***

Semple McPherson arrived in Necropolis as a beam-me-down shimmer of transitional atoms, bounced across the curve by the collective telekinesis of Aimee and her nuns. As Semple emerged into comparative real-space, she discovered that she had arrived in an exact volumetric area already being occupied by an itinerant street boy, a cut-price, bicameral James Dean wearing two-tone eye makeup and metallic faux Egyptian clothing. Under other circumstances, the collision might have produced a serious conflict, perhaps even a low-yield plasmic detonation. The boy, however, who could have set new records in contrived vacancy, was absolutely no match for Semple’s honed steel will and the collective energy still flowing through her. Her mind swarmed his, stunning all functions and rolling it helplessly over. At the same time, her molecules made an end run around his material structure and collapsed its base integrity, swiftly forcing him out toward Limbo.

“Back to the pod, kid. That’ll teach you to get in my way.”

She felt little more than a faint protesting whisper of his departing presence as she displaced him. The whisper, however, was enough to communicate the boy’s gender, and for a single nanosecond she was tempted by the idea that it might be fun to retain it. She might enjoy being a boy, but she immediately rejected the thought as wild but impractical. She was on a mission in strange and maybe dangerous territory, and the novelty of being male might offer fatal distractions. The mere thought proved enough to raise a splinter on the banister of smooth transition, and Semple found herself snagged by a shard of the previous occupant.

The boy’s soul may have gone easily, but the glitched body was harder to lose. Her momentary lapse had turned her into a burly hermaphrodite with full female breasts, both a vagina and a penis, a dishwater-blond pompadour and sideburns, and a bad case of acne. Worst of all, she also discovered that there was a great yawning divide between the two halves of his/her brain. Only a final and supreme effort of will restored the familiarity and comfort of her accustomed form, erased the superfluous male organs, and returned functional synchromesh to her frontal cortex. Even when all that had been achieved, though, she realized that her troubles had only just started.

Her body might be back, but she was now dressed in inherited clothing, albeit mercifully gender-corrected. In some respects, this was just as well. The scarlet Dynasty outfit would have been hideously out of place in this environment. On the other hand, the new costume that clung to her now presented its own challenge. She looked down at herself and saw that, apart from a wide collar of gilt and lapis that concealed nothing but part of her shoulders and her collarbone, she was naked from the waist up. The only consolation was that she was not the only woman so exposed. Toplessness, it seemed, was high fashion in the city of Necropolis.

Further observation quickly revealed that the creator of Necropolis was obsessed by the question of what ancient Egypt might have been like had its religion, aesthetics, and culture survived all the way to the end of the twentieth century. The creator, presumably the individual now posing as the god Anubis, had incorporated many of the fanciful projections of this obsession into the design of his postmortem world. One of these was that the women of Necropolis went around bare-breasted in public, much in the style of the thirteenth century B.C. Semple had never been anyplace where convention dictated naked breasts, and the experience took a little getting used to. It wasn’t that Semple was a prude, or had any philosophical objection to flaunting her tits. When she and Aimee had divided, she had made sure that all of those inhibitions and hang-ups had been deposited with her sister. As if to prove her cultural flexibility, she swiftly reshaped herself so that the now-exposed and unsupported parts of her body showed themselves to their best advantage.

She then took stock of the rest of the ensemble that she would apparently be expected to wear for the duration of her visit. It consisted of a wraparound skirt with a long, narrow, decorative apron that extended from her waist to below her knees. Primary accessories proved to be the aforementioned gilt collar and a narrow cobra chaplet, also gilt, that circled her head, holding her now exceedingly curly black hair in place. On her feet, she discovered a pair of gold open-work thong sandals. Though she had no mirror, she suspected that, had she been able to see herself, her makeup would have been very like that of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. All in all, the effect was a futuristic version of a fresco from the era of Ramses II. She wasn’t sure if she liked it, but it had a definite coherence. For something that had been quite literally thrust on her, the new look could have been a great deal worse.

Her next move was to take stock of the place where she found herself. She appeared to have materialized in a public plaza or atrium that ran the length of a huge, tunnellike structure of glass and cast iron that greatly resembled a Victorian railroad terminal from the golden age of steam, although, of course, it came without trains or tracks. The edges of this paved pedestrian area were lined with merchant stalls and booths, while its center was taken up by a long avenue of geometrically planted palm trees and massive marble statues of the gods of ancient Egypt. The tallest of these reared to a height of forty or fifty feet, almost to the curved glass roof of the structure. The place seemed reasonably busy. All around her, citizens, looking a lot like her, hurried and bustled about their business. Indeed, business appeared to be the key in this world. She had entered Necropolis in the middle of some mercantile center. As Semple absorbed all this, she scowled and took a deep breath. “I appear to have landed topless in a mall.”

Shopping malls had, of course, developed well after Semple’s and Aimee’s death, but she had made an ample study of them during her investigation of Californian Valley girl culture. This example in Necropolis appeared to be a mall in decline. The overall look was one of dirt and neglect. The air was rank and polluted, and Semple’s eyes were soon watering. Depressing gray light filtered through the filthy panes of the once-magnificent roof, more directly where they were actually missing. The precise lines of palms were either dead or dying; some had gone altogether, their planters standing empty like the sockets of decayed teeth. Drifts of ignored and uncollected garbage were heaped up in nooks and corners. Unhealthy, malformed pigeons flapped, fluttered, and scuttled between the feet of pedestrians, and Semple thought she saw rats moving among the piles of garbage.

As if in harmony with the dirt and decay, the people of Necropolis looked worried and stressed, as though the burdens of Afterlife lay heavy on them. Semple wondered how many of them had come there of their own accord, and how many were, like Aimee’s angels, created by Anubis for his own amusement and gratification. They showed a distinct uniformity. They all wore the same clothes and similar makeup. They were all dark-haired and dark-skinned, and approximately the same height. No children were in evidence. All this led Semple to believe that the majority were created creatures of Anubis rather than formerly mortal souls. One sign of uniformity gravely disturbed Semple. As far as she could see, each and every one of the population had a computer barcode, black, rectilinear, and slightly larger than a postage stamp, printed squarely in the middle of his or her forehead, about three-quarters of an inch above the bridge of the nose, like a high-tech version of a Hindu caste mark.

Semple’s immediate conclusion was that coming to Necropolis had been nothing less than a terrible mistake. No way was she going to find the poet of Aimee’s schemes and dreams in this place. Poets couldn’t flourish among a people so locked down that they let themselves be computer coded. The manner of her arrival had also left a lot to be desired, and looked to have all the makings of embarrassment, or worse. Her brief but furious struggle to achieve a suitable bodily form had been observed by a large number of passersby, many of whom had stopped to stare as the body of the street boy had dissolved into a vague column of shapeless ectoplasm and then reconfigured itself, first as the grotesque hermaphrodite and then as a tall, good-looking woman. Obviously this was no regular occurrence, and gawkers continued to gawk for some time after the fact, making it hard for her to blend with the surroundings.

As Aimee had predicted, Necropolis looked to be an iron-grip police state. From where she stood, Semple could see no less than three pairs of heavily armed and armored men, with the unmistakable arrogant amble of law enforcement on patrol. In Necropolis, the faces of the cops were grimly anonymous, fully hidden behind the full-face visors of sinister egg-shaped helmets, wholly smooth apart from a decorative pair of stylized vestigial wings where the ears should have been. The officers’ bulky, dark blue body armor gave them a weight of bully-boy power that caused the rest of the populace to allow them the widest possible berth. The armor was constructed from flat flexible bricks of Kevlar, arranged in the manner of an insect carapace, perhaps as some kind of scarab homage. The complex large-bore weapon that each officer carried in the crook of his arm was the ultimate demonstration of potential force. Semple had never seen guns like these before, but she could guess at their destructive power.

Semple’s first impression, that coming to Necropolis had been a fundamental error, was now being confirmed by every fresh detail. She decided that her only chance was to get away from this too-public area. She needed to hole up in some secluded place and think through her next move. Without a team circle like Aimee’s nuns to provide her with the necessary telekinetic energy boost, she couldn’t simply vibe out the way she’d come, wind walking to the great wide open. She would have to blow town under her own power, but without the slightest knowledge of the geography or relative dimensions of the place, she knew this might require a modicum of planning.

Even in finding temporary refuge, Semple was beset by obstacles. The first rank of merchants and vendors along the edge of the plaza were just casual traders with small removable stalls. Behind them was a line of permanent structures that Semple had to assume were the Necropolis equivalent of stores and cafes. The problem was that all the signs were written in the hieroglyphics of the nineteenth dynasty and Semple was totally unable to read them. She could, of course, follow her nose. She had been around the block enough times to be confident that she could locate a bar or even a coffee shop by sense of smell. What worried her more was that she knew nothing of the manners and protocols of the city. What, for instance, was the status of women? Could a woman just walk into a bar and order a drink, or was that some kind of social taboo? And how would she pay for it? Did they have currency in this place? She remembered from her time on Earth that in certain bars ladies drank for free. If such a place existed here, how would she know? Damned hieroglyphics.

Semple was starting to realize how much she had forgotten about her and her sister’s tent-show hustling days. The first two rules of going into a strange town were a girl had to know how to read the signs, and had to have a cash stake to get rolling. The Afterlife, with its easy fantasy fulfillments, had made her careless. If she didn’t get back on the ball with some alacrity, she could well be paying for her isolation the hard way.

Head down, avoiding all eye contact and keeping as far as possible from the patrolling pairs of law officers, she quickly put some distance between herself and her arrival point, and the handful of witnesses who had seen what had gone down with the boy and the transitory hermaphrodite. Despite all her efforts to melt into the crowds, however, people kept on looking at her. No matter what evasive tactics she might employ, she continued to receive batteries of constant and curious stares. Even the stallholders at the edge of the square, who couldn’t possibly have seen her strange arrival, glanced at her with expressions that might be reserved for some outlandish mutant.

Semple started to feel spooked and desperate. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

As far as she could tell, nothing was particularly unusual about the way she looked. She should have been at one with the crowd. It couldn’t be her clothes. Both men and women wore some variation on the wraparound skirt. The colors and patterns might be a matter of individual choice, but no one deviated too far from the basic design. Everyone wore eye shadow and lipstick. Both genders were basically bare to the waist, although some of the men sported sleeveless jackets with jutting, science-fiction shoulders. Most wore decorative collars similar to the one that was around her own neck, and these only really differed in size and in the lavishness of their decoration, possibly serving as an indication of the wearer’s status or wealth. Semple’s collar was large and heavily inlaid with lapis; if the status theory held good, the goddamned proles ought to be treating her with a measure of respect, not eyeballing her like she had two heads.

“It has to be my face.” She could see nothing wrong with the parts of her that were visible; the only logical conclusion was that the fault lay in an area that she was unable to see. She doubted that anyone had managed to affix the Necropolis equivalent of a KICK ME sign to her back. Had she come through somehow deformed, an elephant woman with three eyes or two noses? She had an easy and immediate way of finding out. She hurried to the glass display window of the nearest store and peered at her own reflection. She saw no disfigurement. In fact, her face looked pretty much as it always had, apart from a frame of new curls. As she had guessed, she was wearing a Cleopatra paint job. Her eyes were ringed with black kohl, drawn to elongated points at the outer corners and shadowed with imperial purple. What she hadn’t expected was the white pearlized lip gloss, but she’d seen a number of other women sporting a similar innovation, so that could hardly be what was making everyone look. So what was the problem?

And then the weight of realization dropped on her. No barcode. No fucking barcode! She froze with her face close to the glass of the store window. Her heart sank. Everyone she’d seen, without exception, carried one on their forehead. She all but cursed out loud. “I’m in a fucking Egyptian police state with no fucking papers!” The clothes and makeup came with the goddamned territory. How come no barcode?”

The ramifications hardly bore thinking about, and questions crowded in so hard and fast that they all but pushed Semple to panic. How bad was the omission? Well, seemingly bad, if everyone goggled as though she were a freak. And what exactly did the barcode signify? Was it just a permanent ID, or did it go further? Maybe it was a money substitute, a tattooed credit card that was the basis of the city’s entire economy. If that was the case, her pooch was screwed. Not only would she be regarded as some weird mutant, but she’d also be left to beg or starve. “Like, what do you intend doing about it, okay? You’re in a mall with no money, girl.”

The short-term answer seemed fairly simple. Everyone in town wore makeup, so there ought to be cosmetics stores in abundance. Beg, borrow, or steal. Get hold of an eyebrow pencil. Draw in a barcode of her own. It might not buy her a cup of coffee, but at least it would stop the stares. She scanned the line of stores on either side of her, and saw nothing that approached a beauty parlor or drugstore that might provide what she needed. The window she was using to examine her reflection belonged to some kind of fabric supply and displayed various colored bolts of the popular metallic cloth. The two stores on either side were disused and boarded up. This Necropolis mall was a haven for failure.

Semple began walking slowly along the row, turning her face away when anyone approached, trying to attract as little attention as possible. She passed a store that appeared to sell assorted stuff in earthenware jars that she assumed were some kind of foodstuffs, and another that had a window display of elaborate, harnesslike devices fashioned from leather and chains that she neither understood nor wanted to think about. No sign of cosmetics presented itself, but for all she knew, a sign saying FREE MASCARA HERE could have been staring her in the face and she wouldn’t have been any the wiser. The next place she came to had no display window, but its stucco frontage was covered by a mass of hieroglyphics in garish multicolored neon. Although Semple had no idea of the literal content, the nature of the place was plain. A bar was a bar was a bar, anywhere in infinity.

Semple had a great deal more experience of bars and how to work and operate in them than many would have expected. Back when she and Aimee had inhabited the same mortal body, it had been Semple who, late at night, while Aimee withdrew from consciousness, dolled herself up, ultimately whore-trashy, all the way from lingerie to lipstick. It was Semple who slipped out of the hotel and went saloon cruising for sailors, studs, and salesmen, so in the morning Aimee could pretend that she hadn’t enjoyed them.

This bar in Necropolis had a smell that, although unmistakable, was a little sweeter than the usual shot, beer, and cigarette aroma of a regular twentieth century joint. Semple didn’t know what this might portend, but she figured she absolutely had to make a move. She walked past the neon hieroglyphics, turned into the alcohol warmth of the dark doorway, hesitated for a moment, and, hoping for the best, went inside.

***

Two deep sonorous booms, like slowed-down thunderclaps, echoed from the cantina. They were followed, a couple of seconds later, by rapid fire-bursts of blue-white light like the popping of photographers’ flashbulbs. The thirty feet of hanging silk that covered one of the missing sections of wall suddenly billowed outward as though blown by an exhalation of giant breath. In the middle of the street, Jim glanced at Saladeen. “Looks like the Haitians are having themselves a high time in the old saloon.”

Saladeen shuddered. “Don’t even talk about them.”

By this point, all but a handful of the human and animal clientele had left the cantina. Long Time Robert Moore had been among the first, hurrying out with his guitar case in one hand and the other clamped hard to his hat, holding it in place like a storm was threatening. Euclid the dog was hiding under the same section of sidewalk where Jim and Saladeen had previously been sitting, invisible except for a pair of wary, mismatched eyes. Both Doc and Lola, however, had elected to remain inside. Jim was tempted to go inside and take a look. He was curious to see how a trio of honky-tonking Voodoo demigods disported themselves. More important, he could feel the booze calling out to him through the traumatic night, just the way it had done one million times before, booze being no respecter of either place or situation. He was over the shock of the blinding light and the Mysteres’ arrival, but now he was a little put out that his benignly comfortable high had been so rudely demolished. He wanted to get to work rebuilding its warm protective euphoria as soon as he could. About the only thing that stopped him from boldly going up the steps and in the door was the fact that Saladeen would undoubtedly freak out. Afro-boy seemed positively terrified of the Queen, the Baron, and the Doctor. The chance existed, of course, that Saladeen knew something he didn’t, and for the moment Jim bided his time.

It didn’t take long, however, before Jim’s cravings overtook him. He started walking, but faltered when another of the rumbling booms rolled from inside. This hesitation gave Saladeen a chance to catch up with him. “Are you out of your fucking mind, man? You can’t go in there.”

Jim turned angrily on his short-time companion. “Who the fuck says I can’t? I’ve got a killer thirst coming on and no bunch of shantytown spooks is going to eighty-six me out of the bar.”

Saladeen all but turned green. “You’re fucking crazy, Morrison. You don’t know what the fuck you’re messing with.”

“And I suppose you’re going to tell me?”

Saladeen was staring wide-eyed at a new popping flurry of blue brilliance. “I ain’t telling you nothing.”

Jim was losing patience. “What’s with you? You sound like a fucking Tarzan movie. ‘Don’t go in there, bwana. Many evil spirits.’ ”

This was too much for Saladeen and anger finally overrode his fear. “You wanna watch what you’re saying, motherfucker. No one talks to Saladeen Al Jabar like that.”

Jim stared hard in Saladeen’s face. “Oh yeah?”

They were virtually toe to toe. “Fucking right, motherfucker! Nobody.”

The two men might have fallen to brawling right then and there if Doc Holliday hadn’t come walking out of the cantina at the same moment. He looked around, spotted Jim and Saladeen, and started in their direction. “Morrison, a moment, sir. I need to have a word with you.”

Jim stepped away from Saladeen and took a breath. “We’ll get back to this later.”

Saladeen glared. “I’ll be waiting on you.”

Doc took in the way the two men were bristling at each other. For a moment, it looked as though he were going to comment, but then he seemed to think better of it and addressed himself directly to Jim. “You had better relax yourself, my friend. I have a request to make of you that I don’t think you’re going to like.”

Jim sighed. “I usually have to be in town at least a full day before they start giving me the bad news.” He glanced at Saladeen. “I mean, I haven’t even gotten in a fight yet.”

Doc ignored the glance. “I regret I’m going to have to ask you to leave town.”

Jim couldn’t believe Doc was saying it. “Leave town?”

“You got it.”

“You’re running me out of town?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“You’ve got multiple-murdering dogs drinking themselves stupid on the street and you want to run my inoffensive ass out of town?”

“It isn’t any negative reflection on your character, believe me.”

“It isn’t?”

“You’ve got to realize that it’s nothing personal.”

Doc half glanced in the direction of the cantina and Jim immediately fixed on this. “This is some Voodoo-instigated bullshit, right?”

“It is, but don’t ask because I can’t tell.”

“They told you to toss me out of town?”

Doc treated Jim to a hard, warning look. “Keep your damned voice down.”

Saladeen threw in his ten cents’ worth. “You tell him, Doc. Lame won’t listen to me. Motherfucker hasn’t got the brains to be scared of them.”

Doc regarded Jim bleakly. “A man’s best friend can be a measure of healthy fear.”

“I thought a man’s best friend was his dog.”

“Not the way dogs are here.”

Saladeen upped his bet to a full quarter. “If someone told me to get out of town and was good enough to let me know it was Queen Danbhalah motherfucker La Flambeau and her crew behind it, I’d be long gone; no questions. You know what I mean? Lawdy mama, feets do your stuff; all the minstrel bullshit, and this nigger wouldn’t give a damn. You better believe me, Morrison. I’d be history, and willingly.”

Jim looked from Saladeen to Doc, and a glint of the old devil was kindled in his eye. “And what if I just stayed put?”

Doc half turned so the light glinted on the gold lightning flash and the mother-of-pearl grip of Elvis’s deluxe Colt. The gun rested heavy in the shoulder holster on the left side of Doc’s chest. Jim’s eye was immediately drawn to it. Doc observed where he was looking and he cracked a dry smile. “Persuasive?”

Jim slowly nodded. “It’s the Gun That Belonged to Elvis, isn’t it?”

Doc’s expression was uncompromising. “Wholly correct, my unfortunate friend.”

Weapons in the Afterlife, particularly firearms, were mainly props to image or vanity, or leftover habits. In the normal run of things, they presented little more than a momentary threat to anyone but the created creatures of fantasy. The Gun That Belonged to Elvis was a little different, however. Like the Flaming Sword of the Red Angel, the Slingshot of David, Hitler’s Revolver, the Knife Prince Yussupov Used to Kill and Castrate Rasputin, or the Great Siege Cannon of Don Carlos O’Neal, the Gun That Belonged to Elvis was a significant figment of celestial mythology and postmortem folklore. As such, its effect was totally unpredictable. A gold bullet from its barrel might well blast Jim all the way back to the Great Double Helix, or even rearrange him into some totally new, unknown, and probably unacceptable form. Jim had seen the very same pistol used against Moses, and the self-designed prophet had appeared to suffer nothing more than brief pain, but Jim Morrison wasn’t going to take any chances. Now that his memory was slowly returning, he recalled too many of the legends concerning the Colt of Elvis. That Doc Holliday should even threaten him with it meant the situation was grave; no negotiation or debate.

Jim deflated with a shrug. “So I guess that’s it. Come with the dust and be gone with the wind.”

Without anyone noticing his approach, Long Time Robert Moore was standing beside the three men. The lone diamond in the gold tooth twinkled as he spoke. “I’ll give you a ride as far as the Crossroads, if you want it, boy.”

Jim frowned. “A ride?”

The old bluesman grinned. “In my Cadillac.”

“You got a Cadillac?”

“Sure do. Long and black and fully loaded.”

“As far as the Crossroads?”

“All the way to the Crossroads.”

“What happens at the Crossroads?”

“You go your way and I go mine.”

Jim hesitated. The other three looked at him intently. Finally Jim laughed. “Sure, I’ll take a ride to the Crossroads in your Cadillac.”

Robert Moore nodded. “Then I’ll go and get the car. You all just wait right here.”

As Moore walked away, a pair of more staccato, higher-pitched bangs cracked from the cantina. Jim, Doc, and Saladeen half ducked, but Long Time Robert Moore just kept on walking.

When he returned with his Cadillac a few minutes later, the first thing Jim knew was that Robert Moore’s car couldn’t be faulted for magnificence. It was a black Coupe de Ville, probably a ’56 or ’57, but so majestically customized that its true origins were obscured. It sported six headlights and four military spots. It had been lengthened to forty feet long, and the oversized fins looked designed for a V2 rocket. The black gloss of the Cadillac’s paintwork was so perfect, so opulent and deep, that it threatened to drown anyone looking too closely. Instead of the standard lavish chrome bumpers, the ones on Long Time Robert’s car were in the form of two relief figures of naked women, sculpted in the style of Erte.

The huge juggernaut of a car pulled up beside Jim. The passenger door swung open and Long Time Robert Moore waved for him to get in. Jim looked at Doc. “So I guess I’m out of here?”

“Like I said, it isn’t personal.”

“I never did get to visit Sun Yat.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Next time?”

“Infinity is a very long time, my friend.”

Jim sighed. “Ain’t it just.”

He lowered himself into the leopardskin interior of Robert Moore’s Cadillac. It smelled of incense, old leather, Chanel No. 5, and high-test marijuana. Robert Moore sat behind the wheel; to Jim’s surprise, a Marilyn Monroe blonde, complete with white dress, was sitting in back. She smiled at him as he got in, but said nothing. Long Time Robert Moore put the car in gear and glanced at Jim. “Ready to go, rock and roll boy?”

Jim nodded. “Ready to go.”

***

Although the outside light could hardly be described as bright, it took Semple’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the red gloom inside. As soon as she was able to see, she was pleased to discover that her supposition had been correct. The decor might be Egyptienne, but it was a saloon as she knew and recognized one, complete with bar, stools, and booths to one side. All it lacked was a jukebox playing Patsy Cline or Frank Sinatra, but they probably didn’t have such things in Necropolis. The dim interior made it hard to see every detail, but the place reminded her of a run-down version of some upmarket deco joints she had seen on Earth.

She had half expected something weird and exotic, like reclining couches and a sunken bar, or perhaps oiled slaves wielding peacock fans and pouring odd-colored wine from stone jars, but what she’d found was all disconcertingly normal. Maybe the standard barroom setup from the twentieth century was simply the most practical design for serving alcohol, or maybe Anubis’s imagination had failed on this detail. About the only radically different element was a flat, triangular, wall-mounted screen behind the bar. Semple had to assume it was a Necropolis television set, but, coming as she did from the age of radio, she had little experience of TV. All she gathered was that, at least at the moment, Necropolis TV wasn’t showing any actual programs. Just the jackal head of Anubis, slowly and regally revolving against a dramatic sky filled with threatening storm clouds.

Semple selected a barstool and seated herself. She experienced a certain dismay when she saw no other women customers; she’d been hoping to borrow a makeup kit in the ladies’ room with which to fake a makeshift barcode. On the other hand, she hadn’t been instantly ejected, so she seemed to have made it this far without violating any local custom. The only other customer was an overweight man, his unattractive stomach sagging over his skirt. He and the bartender, a slimmer but balder individual, were at the far end of the bar, discussing the up-and-coming public punishment of runaway slaves. Apparently such events were a popular spectator sport. But the revelation that Necropolis was a slave culture could hardly be good news for anyone who was unable, as she was, to prove her free citizen status.

The bartender broke off his conversation and moved toward her. As he sidled the length of the bar, he made a long and undisguised appraisal of her bare breasts. If the bartender was representative, and bartenders usually were, regular exposure to naked tits apparently did nothing to diminish or reduce the average male fascination with them. “So what’s it to be, lady?”

Semple rejoiced. At least she understood the local language. Either the bartender was speaking English or her brain was now rigged for instant translation. She looked around quickly and then indicated the drink the overweight customer had in front of him. “Give me one of those.”

“I ain’t so sure that I should serve you.”

Semple inwardly groaned but readied herself to bluff it out. “Why not?”

The bartender gestured to her forehead as though it were self-evident. “You know why not. No mark. You’re an outlander.”

“Is that a crime?”

Semple immediately realized that she had said the wrong thing. The bartender laughed nastily and called out to the overweight customer, “Little lady here wants to know if it’s a crime to be an outlander.”

As Semple’s heart was sinking without trace, the overweight customer climbed down from his stool and wheezed toward her. “So let’s have a look what we’ve got here.”

Seeing the man standing, Semple had to revise her first impression. He was more than overweight, he was downright fat. He waddled up to her and peered into her face. A chubby thumb and forefinger grasped her chin and he turned her head first one way and then the other. For the moment, Semple didn’t resist, even though, when he spoke, his breath was rank with garlic and something that smelled like cheap gin. “No mark.”

The bartender nodded. “No mark.”

“So give her a drink anyway.”

“How’s she gonna pay for it?”

The fat customer grinned. “I’ll pay for it.”

The bartender looked doubtful. “You could get me into trouble.”

The fat customer was dismissive. “Who’s to know?”

“You could get yourself into trouble.”

“Don’t be so chickenshit. It’s a perfect opportunity.”

The bartender. “It is?”

The fat customer’s eyes were beady and unpleasant. “Sure it is. Have some fun with her before we turn her in.”

As far as Semple was concerned, this had gone far enough. “Hey, boys, don’t I have a say in any of this?”

Both men looked at her in surprise. “You?”

Semple was not only frightened but angry. “Yes, me.”

“You don’t have nothing to say, bitch. You’re an outlander. You better be nice to us.”

“And if I’m not?”

“You think we care? I mean, who you gonna complain to, huh? You can’t exactly go running to the guards, now, can you? You just make nice, and maybe we’ll let you slip away when we get finished.”

Semple tried playing for pity. “I know I’m an outlander, but it was all just a mistake. It was a total accident that I wound up here. You don’t have to turn me in, do you?”

The fatso’s face was wreathed in an oily smile. “That depends on you.”

Now she played dumb. “I don’t understand.”

The fat man waved a finger at the bartender. “Give her a drink.” “It’s your funeral.”

The bartender set a shallow blue glass bowl on the bar and filled it from a bottle with a hieroglyphic label and a metal pourer. He added a dash of something from another, smaller bottle and finally dropped in two things that looked like dried peppers. For a moment, Semple wondered if he was finally going to set fire to the whole concoction, but he didn’t. He simply scanned the fat man’s forehead with something resembling a flashlight. Something else under the bar whistled asthmatically as the data downloaded. Semple recognized the sound of a pneumatic computer. Something was usually amiss with Afterlife cultures that included pneumatic or steam-driven computers.

With the drink concocted and charged, the bartender moved back to a neutral position. The fat man smiled nastily and slid Semple’s dish along the bar so it was closer to her. “Here, girlie, drink up.”

Semple hesitated, if for no other reason than that she wasn’t exactly sure how she was supposed to handle the odd, shallow container. Most of Semple’s experience had been with drinks in tall glasses that came with ice. For all she knew, in Necropolis they lapped their drinks from the saucer like pussycats. She decided, however, that this was a little unlikely. With as much gentility as she could muster, and using both hands, she lifted the dish with her fingertips.

The fat man hissed in her ear, “Down in one, now. Show us you’re a big girl.”

Semple tilted the dish. The stuff tasted like curried creosote, but she didn’t show her distaste and went right on tilting until the liquid was all gone. Anything to defer the inevitable flashpoint. She replaced the dish on the bar. The dried peppers still lay in the bottom. She didn’t know if she was supposed to eat them, like the worm in the bottle of mescal, but she thought probably not. If that had been the case, the fat man would certainly have insisted that she do it right then. He was the kind that wouldn’t miss any chance to humiliate the supposedly helpless. He again gestured to the bartender. “Do her one more time.”

It was about then that the drink hit her. Her throat burned, her stomach cramped, and she gasped for breath as the room made a couple of fast three-sixty circuits. Semple’s eyes watered, her vision blurred, and her head spun. She felt like throwing up and she didn’t quite understand why. In the Afterlife, one didn’t have to automatically respond to stimulants. One was supposed to have a choice. She would have liked to control and even abort the swimming, queasy feeling that currently gripped her, but she couldn’t. Had the rules been somehow changed in Necropolis? All she could do was look quickly at the bartender. “No, not yet. Give me a minute to get over the last one.”

The fat man ignored her. He glared at the bartender. “I said give her another.”

The bartender started the pouring routine, but with an attitude that made it clear the fat man was on his own. When it was done, the fat man leaned close to Semple. “Drink it up, girlie.”

Semple shook her head. “I told you already. I need a moment.”

A fat hand was on her thigh. The fingers were digging into the muscle, tightening their grip until it was hard enough to bruise. “I said drink it, bitch.”

Semple let out a short, angry breath. “Okay, okay.”

The fat fingers relaxed slightly. Again she picked up the dish with both hands and raised it to her lips. Suddenly the fat man’s arm was in the way. His hand clamped roughly on her breast. Semple slowly and patiently lowered the dish, exhibiting every ounce of jaded weariness that she could summon. “Either I drink or you feel my tits. You’re going to have to make up your mind, because to do both is physically impossible.”

The fat man’s face turned beet-red. He came half off the stool, hauled off and slapped Semple hard across the face. Semple was knocked all the way off her stool and the blue glass dish went flying. It spun like a Frisbee and shattered on the far wall. The fat man was breathing hard. “Sewer-mouthed outland whore!”

As the bartender protested, the fat man stood up to hit her again, but he was flabby and out of shape and Semple wasn’t. Her knee snapped up and, despite her blurred vision, it connected with his groin. She must have gotten his testicles, too, because the fat man doubled over with an almost girlish scream. Semple didn’t wait around to see what the bartender would do. She was going for the door with all the speed of self-preservation. Her single instinct was to run, into the dirty daylight and away. Except that, right outside the door, unable to check her headlong flight, she collided with something large and hard and blue. Her outstretched hands encountered what felt like the plates of a giant insect. She looked up and found she was staring directly into a blank, unforgiving visor. Blue gloved hands gripped her wrists. “So what seems to be the problem here?”

A second blank mask joined the first. Apparently the cops in Necropolis were at least a head taller than the rest of the population. This one repeated the question. “So what seems to be the problem here?”

Semple wanted to point to the bar, but she couldn’t. The cop still had hold of her wrists. “In there . . . this man . . . ”

The second cop peered into her face and turned to his companion, the one holding her. “No mark.”

The first cop also looked and nodded. “No mark.”

The cops’ voices came from their helmets muffled and metallic. The first cop looked at the second cop. It was like a conversation between two not particularly bright robots.

“Going to have to take her in.”

“Yes. Going to have to take her in.”

Before she could resist in any way, Semple was spun around by the officers; a framelike device of stainless steel clamped over her wrists. The next cop-voice statement was even more robotic, intoned as a legal ritual. “I arrest you as an unregistered female wandering at large as defined under Section Ninety-three, Subsection Forty of the Code of Anubis. All future conduct will become a matter of record in this case. I say again, I am arresting you. Do not resist or you will be immobilized.”

It had all happened so fast that Semple was too stunned to resist. She allowed herself to be led away. Somewhere behind her, other officers had arrived, and the fat man also seemed to be under arrest. It was a fact that offered her little comfort.

***

Long Time Robert Moore handed Jim a fat joint of the finest Hawaiian herb rolled in wheatstraw paper. “Figure we did the right thing back there, Rock and Roll.”

“You mean getting out of town?”

Moore nodded. “I surely do. When them Caribbean Mysteres get to jooking, I always believe it be time to duck and cover, if it ain’t time to plain duck and run.”

Jim took the joint with a certain resignation. Here he was, taking drugs in yet another car, on one more road to who the hell knew where. The story of his life also seemed to be becoming the story of his death. The truth was that he was less than happy about being ordered out of Doc Holliday’s little town. He had hoped the place might have provided him a refuge for a while, a place to chill and maybe get a handle, to reconstruct his memory as far as he could after the destructive craziness of the Moses orgy. He had even been hoping to get to know Lola. He’d thought he might be able to avoid having to run through the darkness yet again, but here he was doing exactly that.

“I thought you were pulling out anyway. Like going to the Crossroads.”

“We’re going to the Crossroads now. That’s for sure.”

“You want to tell me about the Crossroads?”

Long Time Robert shook his head. “No.”

“No? Just like that?”

Long Time Robert Moore’s gravel voice exhibited a definite trace of irritation. The old man might have chops close to divine, but he was one closemouthed son of a bitch. “Listen, Rock and Roll, you gonna find out about the Crossroads soon enough. In fact, if I have you figured, you already know plenty about the Crossroads.”

“I do? I hadn’t noticed.”

“You been to the Crossroads.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Sure you have. You just ain’t recalling it right now.”

Jim drew hard on the joint, deciding that his best policy was probably to shut up and try to avoid annoying Robert Moore. Whatever was coming next would be on him soon enough; there was no point in talking about it. As he passed the spliff back, he glanced into the vast rear of the Caddy and smiled at the Marilyn blonde. She returned his smile with a sexy pout and a recrossing of her legs. That seemed to be her entire repertoire of social communication; Jim began to wonder if she could talk at all. It was hardly his problem, though, and he eased back into the soft leather of the lavish front seat, a virtual in-car armchair, as large as a first-class seat on an airliner. Maybe later Marilyn would serve cocktails. He stretched his legs and did his best not to think. The interior of the car was an easy place to do this, cozy and womblike, an enclosed capsule of safety, reefer, soft darkness, and moving luxury. The only light was the muted green glow from the dashboard, giving it a sense of almost submerged submarine protection in which all possible futures could be held at bay.

Jim narrowed his attention to staring idly out of the window. At that particular, subjective moment, the car hardly seemed to be moving through anything like regular space-time, traveling on a twisting ribbon of unsupported highway that ran through a three-dimensional forest of tall, slender, crystalline pyramids, each of which radiated its own internal blue-green light. Small spheres, Day-Glo red and vibrant acid yellow, drifted overhead in untidy clusters of a dozen or more, just above the peaks of the pyramids, like strange flocks of animated bubbles. Jim wondered if, somehow, the car had switched to traveling on the molecular level. This was, after all, the far country where just about anything was possible.

As soon as he had started to take the pyramids for granted, Jim was surprised to find himself staring at a radically altered landscape. He didn’t remember dozing, but he could hardly recall a transition. “I guess it’s just one of those missing holes in time again.”

Robert Moore glanced sharply at him. “What you say?”

Jim shook his head. “It was nothing. Just talking to myself.”

“Sometimes that’s the only way to get an intelligent conversation.”

The spheres and pyramids had been left behind, and now the Cadillac was rolling on a perfectly normal two-lane country blacktop, under a pitch-black night sky filled with bright, unwinking stars. A huge orange moon hung close to the horizon, and cornfields, flat as a billiard table, without a tree, building, or even a grain elevator to break the monotony, stretched as far as the eye could see. “How did we get to Kansas?”

Long Time Robert Moore looked at Jim as though he were crazy. “This ain’t no motherfucker Kansas.”

“It sure looks like Kansas.”

“I’m telling you, Rock and Roll, this ain’t Kansas. And you ain’t Dorothy and I ain’t Toto.”

As they continued deeper into what Jim was now thinking of as the corn belt, he started to see huge geometric shapes, hundreds of feet long, stamped in the standing crops, circles within circles, joined by the straight lines of extended radii, so they formed complex and enigmatic patterns.

“Crop markings?”

Robert Moore nodded. “Get a lot of them ’round these parts.”

“You ever meet anyone who could read them? Anyone who knew what they meant?”

Robert Moore shook his head. “I did try playing them a couple of times.”

“Playing them? You mean like musical notation?”

“I tried it, but the tunes sounded like shit. All these Neil Diamond chord progressions.”

“You still think they’re some kind of giant song chart?”

Moore turned and looked at Jim. “You know something, Rock and Roll?”

Jim sighed. “You don’t like me asking questions.”

“I got a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“How come you gave up singing?”

“Who said I gave up singing?”

“I’ve heard it all over. You ain’t sung a goddamned note since you fucked up on dope in Paris.”

Jim couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That’s bullshit.”

Long Time Robert shot him a sidelong glance. “Yeah? So when did you last sing, Rock and Roll?”

“I don’t know. I have this problem with my memory.”

“So how do you know what I’m saying is bullshit?”

Jim shook his head in bewilderment. Maybe it was true and Long Time Robert Moore was right. He didn’t know anything for sure. That’s why he’d wanted to hang around Doc’s town for a while and sort out a few of these problems. “I need to think about that.”

“Well, don’t take too long, boy. We’re coming up to the Crossroads.”

Jim peered through the windshield. It was just as Robert Moore said. Up ahead, a second country road intersected the one they were on. As far as he could see, the two made a perfect right angle, slap in the middle of unsignposted nowhere. As they came to the place where the two roads met, Long Time Robert Moore slowed the car to a halt. “So I guess this is far as we go.”

Jim was tempted to ask Moore what he was expected to do now, but he knew that he was unlikely to receive anything but some down-home bit of Zen by way of an answer. Either that or the question would be countered with another question. The bluesman shut off the Cadillac’s engine. “Think I’ll take me a look around.”

Before he got out of the car, Long Time Robert Moore reached around behind his seat and pulled out his guitar case. He took it with him when he climbed out. This puzzled Jim. Was the old man intending to serenade the deserted Crossroads, or maybe try to play the music of the crop circles again? Jim couldn’t believe that he didn’t intend coming back to the car. After he made his exit, Long Time Robert Moore didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He walked a short distance from the Cadillac and then stopped and looked up at the sky. Jim turned to the blonde in the back. “You have any idea what’s going on?”

Marilyn merely shrugged. Her face formed into the familiar, extended upper lip pout. Still Jim couldn’t fathom what she was. Some oddity who had taken Monroe’s form along with a vow of submissive silence? A sex toy that Long Time Robert took on the road with him? Jim knew this was another puzzle to which he would probably never have a solution, and he decided the best thing he could do was get out of the car himself. He walked slowly to a spot near the old man, but maintained sufficient distance so he would not be accused of crowding or following him. Without Jim having to say anything, Long Time Robert turned and looked at him. “You’re wondering what I’m doing, ain’t you, Rock and Roll?”

Jim half smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I’m wondering, but I didn’t want to ask.”

“I’m just waiting for my next ride.”

“What next ride?”

Long Time Robert Moore pointed to a spot on the distant horizon. “Look there, Rock and Roll, it’s coming now.”

A small orange light had appeared at the horizon. It performed a swift, jittering dance and then came directly toward where they were standing. After experiencing the arrival of the Haitian Mysteres in their blaze of static, Jim watched the fast-moving light with a certain apprehension. The object halted directly over them, silently hovering. Jim looked up at it in baffled amazement. “This is a joke, right?”

Above the two of them, some forty feet in the air, nothing less than a flying saucer floated in total silence. Long Time Robert Moore’s face was expressionless. “I don’t see no joke. All I see is that there UFO.”

Still Jim couldn’t believe it. The saucer was the classic design, the kind that was supposed to have crashed at Roswell in 1947, a large disc like an inverted soup dish with a kind of upper turret mounted at its center. The orange light was just the glowing domed top of that turret. On the underside were three large hemispheres that were supposed to have something to do with its means of propulsion. Jim could feel his hair starting to stand on end, just as it was supposed to around flying saucers. “That’s an Adamski saucer.”

Robert Moore looked blank. “I don’t know too much about the makes and models. Just looks like a saucer to me.”

“George Adamski. Back in the early fifties, he was the first guy to claim he was contacted by aliens.”

“He wasn’t the first guy.”

“He claimed to have taken pictures of saucers just like that one. They were all discredited as fakes.”

Long Time Robert seemed unconcerned. “Looks pretty real to me.”

“But what would real aliens be doing here in the human Afterlife?”

Robert Moore grinned. “Them aliens get everywhere. Here, life-side, everywhere.”

“You’re going off in that thing?

“Sure am.”

“Jim could hardly believe this. “You gonna be singing the blues on Zeta Reticuli?”

“I got friends in high places.”

“Can I come, too?”

Robert Moore shook his head. “I don’t think so. Them alien guys are kinda choosy about who they pick up.”

No sooner had the bluesman spoken than a beam of white light stabbed down from the underside of the spacecraft. Long Time Robert Moore was in the exact center of the beam, but Jim was also caught in its periphery. The saucer started to descend, and Jim, now definitely awed, backed quickly away. Robert Moore also took a couple of steps back. The beam of light was shut off and the saucer dropped to just a few feet from the ground, creating tiny dust devils on the surface of the road. For almost a minute, it remained perfectly stationary, and then a hatch slowly opened. Blue light streamed from its interior, and a narrow ramp extended until it was touching the ground. Long Time Robert Moore turned and looked back at Jim. “So I’m gone, Rock and Roll. I’ll be seeing you.”

Carrying his guitar case, the bluesman walked quickly up the ramp. At the precise moment that Robert Moore set foot on the ramp, the Cadillac simply vanished, as though it had ceased to exist now that the bluesman had no more use for it. Jim could only assume Marilyn had gone with it. As Jim watched Robert Moore disappear into the interior of the saucer, a sudden angry impulse took over. Screw the bunch of choosy aliens. He’d had enough of aliens during his life on Earth. They’d always been out there somewhere, lurking in the shadows, materializing and vanishing, bothering pilots, annoying the government, kidnapping travelers on lonely roads, scaring Vern and Bubba while they were fishing in the swamp. The guppy-eyed, gray-skinned, three-fingered little bastards had never deigned to reveal themselves. They never landed on the White House lawn and said, Take me to your leader. (Although, in Jim’s lifetime, the leader would have been Richard Nixon, so who could blame them?) They’d teased him enough. Finally a saucer had appeared and Jim Morrison was damned if he was going to be left behind wondering. He’d find out the truth once and for all. Either he’d see the aliens as they really were or, if the whole thing was sham, he’d know who was behind it.

Without weighing the possible consequences, he darted forward. The ramp was beginning to retract, but Jim jumped, gaining a footing on the moving metal. He swayed for a second like a surfer, struggling to get his balance, and then he dived after Long Time Robert Moore, straight through the entrance and into the craft.