Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

He don’t say nothing.

Semple found herself spinning, half flying, feet lifted from the ground, tossed about in a violent, superheated vortex of dust, debris, and contorted figures; figures that were once human but now nothing more than radiating, dull red skeletons beneath smokelike flesh that barely retained its humanoid shape. Semple was probably screaming, but it was impossible to tell. No single voice, even her own, could rise above the howling cacophony that shrieked across the complete audio spectrum like the seismic howl of a world in cataclysm. Even the sliver of rationality that remained at the deepest core of her identity was filled with a bitter, all-consuming rage. “You really managed to do it this time, didn’t you, you deranged fuck?”

The only thing that could have satisfied that tiny, articulate part of herself would have been learning that Anubis had so overdone his atom bomb test that he himself was now suffering in the same red-mist agony. She prayed, with a fervor worthy of Aimee in her stride, that his royal enclosure, with its cloth-of-gold hangings, its tasteless statues, simpering courtiers, and cannibal snacks, was being shredded in the radioactive maelstrom, that the towers of his despicable city would also soon be melting and burning.

At the same time, Semple’s fury at Anubis was only a momentary distraction from her concern about what might actually be happening to her, and what lay on the other side of the burning nuclear hurricane. The all-consuming power with which it ripped at the very fabric of Necropolis surely had to presage a fate infinitely worse than just a return to the Great Double Helix. Semple’s fear was that she was plunging through an event window that, for all practical purposes, would amount to a death beyond death, perhaps even to the long-rumored outer reaches of Limbo.

“Whatever nightmare I’m going into, I just hope you’re going with me, you dogheaded bastard.”

And yet there was no nightmare awaiting Semple, who merely tumbled anticlimactically to the burning sand as a rude, almost insultingly mundane afterflurry of earth tremor and hot wind sent her sprawling on her hands and knees. The storm of heat and dust and noise was over leaving her with ringing ears, a feeling of having been both flayed and roasted alive, but otherwise intact. The gold collar had become so hot that it was painful to touch; she tore it off and flung it angrily away from her. Moments earlier, it had been a priceless prize. Now it was worthless and irrelevant.

“Damn you and everything connected with you!”

The impossible had occurred; she had survived the atomic assault and if, right there and then, she could have expunged all trace of Anubis and his loathsome domain from her memory and consciousness, she would have done it. The mess that his grandiose folly had created was all around her. Red-ocher dust hung in the air, mingling with the smoke from dozens of small fires, cutting visibility to just a matter of yards. The once-garish flags and banners that had previously fluttered triumphant now flapped weakly in the last eddies of the explosion like burned and mutilated bats. What had once been a crowd was now a scattered profusion of bodies, like dry fallen leaves in the wake of a gale. They lay amid damaged, upturned pushcarts, buckled seats, and tangles of scorched draperies ripped from the viewing stands, and crawled from beneath other wreckage too blackened and twisted to be recognizable. Some almost immediately started sitting up, looking around, eyes glazed with uncomprehending shock, amazed as Semple that they were still in one piece. Others even tried to pick themselves up and rise unsteadily to their feet. Although their clothes were in tatters or ripped away entirely and they were caked with a combination of desert dust and a fine green-black atomic soot, most of those who were already moving looked to be only superficially the worse for the A-bomb trauma. On the other hand, there were quite a number who weren’t moving at all. Next to her a motionless figure lay face down, apparently not breathing, so begrimed that Semple was unable to tell whether it was a man or a woman.

Suddenly the figure started to twitch. Its body was wrenched by an arrhythmic series of spasms. It let out a wrenching groan and slowly began to curl into a fetal ball. Something strange and unpleasant began to happen to its skin. At first Semple thought it was merely the coating of dust flaking off and causing a tracery of hairline cracks to spread rapidly across its torso and back; it was only after a moment, to her horror, that she realized the unfortunate’s actual skin was cracking. Worse still, as the fissures widened, a thick and stinking liquid, the brown color of organic decay, began to ooze from within. As Semple watched, both mesmerized and nauseated, the entire body began wetly to disintegrate. What had once been living flesh melted in loathsome ropes and skeins of goo, away from a brittle ivory-yellow skeleton. Despite its obvious viscosity, this body slime quickly soaked into the sand until all that remained was a dark and foully septic oil slick surrounding a collapsing skeleton.

Semple’s first instinct was to get away from this hideousness. She crab-scrabbled backward, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the sickening remains. After gaining a swift two or three yards, she angled her legs under her and sprang to her feet. Without thinking exactly where she might go, she turned and looked for a route of escape, only to find the same process of accelerated decomposition had more bodies in its disgusting grip. They jerked and contorted as they melted like vampires in the sun, creating a tableau like something from an especially lurid and gruesome fifteenth century painting, with a stench like that of a charnel house.

Not everyone, though, was coming apart. At least for the moment the ones on their feet seemed okay; cut, bruised, and battered, maybe, but definitely in one piece and with their bodily fluids just where they ought to be. Like Semple, they stared at what was happening to their erstwhile companions at the Divine Atom Bomb Festival with horrified revulsion. Had they been spared this hideous fate, or was the same thing about to happen to them? Semple looked down at herself. She was inconveniently naked, but otherwise she seemed intact. What had happened? How could it be that some turned to liquefying mulch and others didn’t? Was it a matter of mind-set? Or were the ones oozing on the ground merely reproduction crowd fillers, while those who remained unaffected were true entities from the lifeside?

Just as Semple was gaining confidence, the first of the standing figures began to melt, quickly followed by a second and a third. Flesh streamed down their bodies like wax cascading down a blowtorched candle. Semple was suddenly and frighteningly certain she could feel something happening inside her own body. It was like a bizarre and disturbing tingle from what she could only describe as the place where flesh clung to bones. Her response was to shout in loud, angry defiance.

“No!”

She would not let herself go like that. She would not allow herself to be reduced to a skull, a rib cage, and a stain. She would hold her body together with the last measure of willpower she could muster. She concentrated, totally focused on locking in the integrity of her physical self, attempting to exert control over each cell, each engineered structure of bone and sinew, each circuital continuation of her nervous system, and each and every vein and artery down to the narrowest microcapillary. On the lifeside, such complete awareness and command of one’s being would have been beyond anyone but the most advanced shaman; in the Afterlife, however, where so much of a person was a deliberate material construct, it was mercifully much easier, although the effort still involved an exhausting expenditure of energy.

On every side, survivors were divided into those who could halt the disintegration and those who couldn’t. Some continued to melt, while others, as far as Semple could tell from the intense frowns on their begrimed faces, appeared to be doing the same as she. Within a matter of just two or three minutes, it was all over. Those who failed to hold themselves intact were gone. Only the strong maintained their shape. The last skeleton collapsed into the last putrid puddle on the sand, and then there were no more meltings. The whittled-down survivors peered around at each other, almost reluctant to believe that they were safe, afraid to jinx their comparative good fortune.

In the next few minutes, however, new troubles emerged. New and very different figures appeared in the lingering remains of the dust storm, not wandering dazedly, but moving with purpose and precision. Phalanxes of Anubis’s guards, both Nubians armed with spears and regular Necropolis rocketeer police with flack jackets over torn and singed dress uniforms, and carrying far more formidable full-auto riot guns, advanced through the dust and debris.

Semple’s stomach clenched. If these cops and Nubians were on their feet, disciplined and organized, the atomic explosion, far from razing Necropolis as she had hoped, must have done little more than muss the hair of those within the royal enclosure. She wondered if Anubis, his harem, or any of his court had fallen victim to the hideous flesh-melt. She passionately hoped that the dog-god was now nothing more than a canine skull, an oily skid mark, but she knew in her heart he wasn’t. Anubis might be one of the most demented psychotics since Ivan the Terrible, but she couldn’t pretend he didn’t have the chops to survive. The real question was, what the hell did the cops and the Nubians think they were doing? The obvious assumption was that they had arrived to provide what aid and comfort they could to those who had survived the Divine Atom Bomb, but Semple somehow doubted that. Aid and comfort were simply not the God-King’s style.

This was dramatically reinforced when a survivor, still confused from the effort of saving himself from the meltdown, stumbled blindly into a Nubian, who promptly ran him through with his gold-tipped spear. Nearby survivors reeled back in terror.

“What the fuck did you do that for?”

Outrage outweighed judgment among one knot of men who had witnessed the stabbing. They started angrily toward the line of mixed authority. “Are you bastards out of your fucking minds?”

No less than three riot guns roared into life, and the knot of bystanders was cut down in its tracks. For a moment, survivors stood stunned. What had they done? What was the slaughter all about? Why had these men, who they thought were the spearhead of some relief effort, suddenly turned on them? Then self-preservation took over. Whatever the reasons, the only hope of escaping was to run.

Semple had some ideas of her own, but she didn’t stick around to test them. Her instinctive suspicion was that Anubis had gone completely insane after the nuclear malfunction, and ordered all those who had witnessed the debacle to be put to the sword or the machine gun. His technician-priests had almost certainly been executed already. To avoid her own extermination she scattered along with the rest, running swift zigzags as gunfire crashed out behind her and the wounded began screaming. For a few moments Semple sought cover to catch her breath, sheltering from the wild bursts of random shooting behind a solid copper boiler from the computer of a burned-out pushcart. Then the Nubians struck up a rhythmic vocal cadence, stamping their feet and calling the moves as they massed in a curved horns-of-the-bull formation. Once their blood was sufficiently up, they lowered their spears and advanced on the fleeing remains of the crowd at a measured lope. The atomic test site was about to become another kind of killing field.

Semple knew she wouldn’t stay hidden for long. The mass of Nubians were sweeping forward, gathering speed, systematically impaling everything in their path, lifting bodies high on their spears while the rocket-man cops gunned down any stragglers that they might have missed. Semple broke cover and started to run, unpleasantly certain that the only possible escape led directly out into the desert, straight toward where the mushroom cloud stood tall and mockingly proud, gray-white and tinged with pink, surrounded by an aura of tiny glowing subparticles.

***

Doc Holliday waved a proprietary hand across the landscape. The Jurassic swamp was now far behind them, the sun was up, and the dinosaurs and weird scenes in the old mansion were diminishing in substance like the black gossamer of a fading nightmare. “Behold the Great River, my boy. Some will tell you that this is the genuine River Styx, the Central Transit of the True Hereafter. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. You’ve never happened to find yourself on the Great River before, have you?”

Doc had decided that Jim needed to rest up after his trek through the swamp, and he had taken the helm of the boat while Jim lazed on the seat cushions in the stern of the launch, drinking and reflecting on how Doc cut something of an incongruous maritime figure, even in the context of this putative River Styx. His filthy, swamp-stained duster coat had been discarded, and he stood behind the wooden wheel in his slouch hat, ruffled shirt, and brocade vest, the skirt of his long gunman’s frock coat whipping in the morning slipstream, as though he’d been displaced from another movie entirely. The elegant motor launch, with its varnished timbers and brass hardware, made a brisk twenty knots, its bow slicing a perfect V wave in the untroubled surface of the water as Doc carefully maintained a course a little to the left of the river’s exact center. Jim took a drink, silently conceding that the legendary pistoleer could maintain a polished dandy’s assurance and a stoned killer’s certainty, no matter what the situation. He shook his head in answer to Doc’s question.

“I can’t remember being on the river, but then again, I still don’t remember too much about too much. For all I know, I could have been running up and down this stretch of Styx like a full-time pirate.”

Jim was growing a little irritated with the mess that was his memory. It had been bad enough when he’d been traveling alone, avoiding man-eating plants or fending off alien proctologists. Now that he seemed, for the present, to be running with Doc Holliday, he was forced to play novice to Doc’s all-knowing mentor. It made for an irksome inequality in their relationship.

“They don’t have too many pirates in this stretch of Styx. They mainly stay downstream, in the delta beyond the swamps, where the pickings are riper. This bit of the Great River is mainly for relaxing and admiring.”

At least Jim was starting to feel alcohol-relaxed, which made Doc’s geography lesson a little more palatable. He’d discovered that Doc had an entire marine cocktail cabinet in the form of a roomy ice chest stuffed with chilled beverages. With a tall green condensation-wet liter of Chinese Tiger beer augmenting his original bourbon, Jim was also doing his fair share of admiring. As Richard Nixon might have said, it certainly was a Great River, a great blue-graygreen, planet-scale artery of slow-flowing water, worthy of landscape paintings in styles from Rousseau to Turner. It flowed broad and smooth, with darker, moss-green rainforest overhanging each spacious bank, combining all the best features of the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Mekong, and the Zambezi. Somewhere inland, in the deep jungle, distant drums beat with a hollow and languorous baritone sensuality. Not drums of warfare or conflict, not the kind of drums that brought a man out in a cold sweat when they stopped, these were the drums of a slow ecstatic ritual in the name of some benignly sexual earth goddess who could make her followers understand that the Afterlife, far from being a shadowy projection of the mortality that had gone before, was actually a stripping of limitations, a removal of blinders and restraints.

The distant drums may have provided the sound, but what was left of Jim’s poetic instincts told him that the river itself pulsed like a mighty hidden heart, from which all surrounding life emanated. It was the energy source of the monkeys who howled in the forest canopies and the thousands of parrots that would suddenly take to the air in brilliant multicolored clouds. It was the yellow light in the eyes of the black panther that slipped along a hunting trail, just yards in from the riverbank; it was what moved the cranes and kingfishers that darted in the shallows while hippos wallowed in the deeper waters. That so much vibrant life could exist in a place beyond death had Jim totally convinced that the Great River was more than just the creation of some master illusionist. If it hadn’t been for recent events, Jim would have found the situation primally idyllic. Unfortunately, drink as he might, he couldn’t altogether shake the impact of all the recent nightshade images. They might fade with the coming of the sun, but they refused to depart completely.

“It was kinda weird back there, Doc. One strange gold mine, that old house.”

Doc didn’t turn or take his eyes off the river. “I long ago gave up making judgments about what’s weird and what isn’t.”

“It seems like it’s going to be the way I end up, though.”

“Beer-fat and sexually twisted ain’t what you call ending up. It’s nothing but one more piss stop on that lonesome highway.”

Jim took a swig of beer and chased it with a little whiskey. “That’s how I ended up on the lifeside. Fat and crazy in Paris. Except I was shooting dope instead of having some broad carve the mark of Zorro on my back with a sword. Of course, I died that time around.”

“So you’ve done that one already. You won’t be dying again. Only one per customer. That’s the rule of the universe. Unless you count the reincarnies.”

“Now time just keeps going out of joint on me.”

Doc’s shrugged, indicating that worse things could come to pass. “Do you miss it?”

“Paris or being fat?”

“Shooting dope.”

Jim shook his head. “Come to think of it, not in the least. I guess, if you die of something, it maybe cures the craving.”

“There’s still plenty of heroin here in these afterdays. A lot of those coming across in recent times seem unable to resist the temptation to reconstitute themselves as junkies. I can’t tell whether it’s a new kind of self-abasement or just old habits dying hard.”

Jim smiled wryly. “I did try it a couple of times after I got here.”

Doc turned and looked at him. “One of the things you do remember?”

“Not the where or when, but certainly the doing.”

“Not the same?”

“Some of the same seduction, but it didn’t have that way about it.”

“That way about it? That’s a goddamned tame description, even for a self-proclaimed ex-poet.”

Jim cringed slightly. “It didn’t have that big jolt; that moment when Sister Morphine makes her promise of absolute and perfect peace, and it becomes the central core of all one’s motivation. I guess, without the risk of death, a lot of the appeal goes out of it.”

Doc nodded. Now Jim was at least trying to be articulate. “So you went back to drinking?”

Jim looked at the bottle in his hand. “I guess I did.”

Doc laughed and beckoned to Jim. “Why don’t you stop drinking and take the helm for a spell so I can do some kicking back and gazing at the scenery?”

With a certain unsteadiness on Jim’s part, the two men switched positions and roles. Doc issued instructions as he settled himself in the stern. “Just keep her steady and don’t try anything fancy. All the caveats about drunk driving also apply to boats.”

Jim straightened his shoulders and gripped the wheel, attempting to act the part of the responsible helmsman. Doc rummaged in the ice chest. “All we had in my day was laudanum and opium.”

“Wasn’t that enough?”

“I kinda thought so, and so did a lot of other folks, from what I observed. In the golden days, it got so there was an opium den behind just about every laundry and chop suey joint from one end of the Santa Fe Trail to the other. And the shit they had back then, my boy, you wouldn’t have believed it. We had Shanghai black tar so powerful that even Curly Bill Broscius and Wes Hardin were seeing visions of the Golden Buddha. Although Curly Bill, who was a fool at the best of times, would usually have to go and try to shoot out the goddamned moon, braying like an ass and claiming the Buddha made him do it.”

“Is it true that Wes Hardin shot a man for snoring?”

“That’s how the story goes. But I wasn’t there, so I could hardly say for sure. I do know that Mr. Hardin was so all-out sociopathic that he’d kill his fellow man without even the courtesy of an excuse. A less oft-told tale is the one about how he carved a whore to dog meat for laughing at the size of his less-than-magnificent penis. She was a Hungarian harlot who called herself Magda, generous of mouth and thigh, but a little short on diplomacy when it came to what she found funny. That such a notorious desperado should be hung like a hamster was just too much for her, and I fear her amusement cost her dear.”

“You were there for that one?”

“Indeed I was, Jim Morrison, indeed I was. And an unpleasantly bloody business it was, too. I found myself tempted to call the son of a bitch out on the matter. I liked Magda, but sadly I didn’t like the odds. Mr. John Wesley Hardin was pure, true, and deadly, and he had an arrangement with a backshooter who went by the name of Nathan Charlie Christmas to give him an extra edge if confronted by the likes of me. I feared he would have bested me, so poor Magda went unavenged. Such is too often the way with whores, particularly on the frontier. I believe Mr. Clint Eastwood made a film about a similar incident.”

“The Mammal with No Name told stories like that.”

“He most probably would. His name was Billy Blue Perkins and he had a mean and violent reputation, all through New Mexico and well across the border, for being a nasty homicidal drunk. I never met the man lifeside that I recall, but I saw a wanted poster for him once after he and his jolly saucy crew had raped and killed some nuns at a wedding party. Funny thing, he kinda looked similar to how he looks now. Kinda weasely of face, if you know what I mean.”

“He’s real remorseful now. Seems to want to be eaten by a pterodactyl.”

Doc tilted his head knowingly and looked mildly contemptuous. “Not remorseful enough to let himself go all the way and be eaten, though.”

Jim had to think about this for a few minutes. Doc was emerging as a high absolutist when it came to matters of guilt and morality. “Either regret nothing or go all the way and take the beating?”

Doc nodded. “That’s always been my opinion, sir. For what small measure it may be worth.”

Jim wasn’t sure how much he agreed with Doc, but he was already a little too drunk to ponder the point. Instead, he changed the subject. “So who’s this Semple McPherson I’m going to find myself shacked up with in my relative future?”

Doc raised an amused eyebrow. “Curious?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Maybe.”

“You know her?”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re not going to tell me?”

“I think it’s something you need to find out for yourself.”

“It’s seems I’m predestined to meet her, though.”

“Who the fuck knows? I’d be the last one to claim that it’s all written and unchangeable. Your timeline seems so fucked up I wouldn’t bet bookmaker odds on anything.”

Jim frowned. He was about to start worrying like a terrier at the paradoxical bone of the distortions of time and fate; but then a pleasure boat, a veritable palace in white and gold, hove into view, way ahead upriver, but coming toward them. Jim adjusted the wheel to give the larger boat a wider birth. Doc nodded his approval at the maneuver. “Stay out of her wake, boy. I don’t want to get so rocked I spill my drink.”

He coughed three or four times. Jim couldn’t figure why Doc clung to his rotting lungs. “Are you ever going to do something about that TB?”

Doc shook his head. “I doubt it. It’s like a trademark.”

As the pleasure boat came closer, Jim marveled at its strange and luxuriously complex design, somewhere between a sculpted iceberg and a floating wedding cake, and far larger than he had first imagined when he’d seen it in the distance. It loomed over the launch like a small ocean liner, but like no ocean liner Jim had ever seen. Parts of it had the appearance of being constructed from custom-fabricated, translucent gemstone crystals, purposely and chemically grown but seemingly too huge to be plausible, especially with their heavy overlay of gold filigree and their surreal engineering. From out of nowhere, the phrase “crystal ship” jumped into Jim’s mind, and reverberated in the wreckage of his memory. Where the hell had he heard that before? He glanced around to Doc. “That thing scarcely seems possible. Like it shouldn’t exist, even here.”

Doc nodded gravely. “I’ll allow you don’t see too many of those. In fact, I wasn’t even aware he did boats. He usually sticks to dry land projects.”

“Who does?”

“Phibes.”

Doc nodded to the bigger craft, now almost level with them. His expression was one of weary disdain. “Yonder monster of overelaboration is a product of the excessively celebrated Runcible Phibes.”

Jim frowned. “Should I know about Phibes?”

Doc pushed back his hat. It was the teacher/pupil routine again.

“Runcible Phibes is the leading light of the post-logical school. Some say post-logicalism is the first truly indigenous art movement of the hereafter, but I fear I am not one of them.”

“Does it really float? Or run on wheels on the river bottom like those Pirates of the Caribbean boats at Disneyland?”

Doc snorted. “I’ve never yet laid eyes on Disneyland, boy. I was seventy years dead when that damned place opened.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect I didn’t miss much. A good friend told me once, and I totally trust his judgment, that Disneyland put him in mind of what Hitler would have wanted the world to be after he’d killed everyone he didn’t like.”

Jim nodded. “That’s definitely one way of looking at it.”

***

The mushroom cloud grew in Semple’s perception until it overwhelmed all else in the landscape. It seemed to be drawing her to it. Somehow its elemental force had managed to infiltrate her consciousness, as though it wanted to force her to join it, or at least to abase herself before it. It seemed to be talking to her, telling her it was the only symbol that remained for her, the Pillar of Cloud in the wildness, the Great Tree of Evil Fruit. She had almost called it the Tree of Life, but there was no way that the word “life” could ever be appropriate for this towering blossom of fundamental destruction, or the accursed place and equally accursed mind that had brought it into being. The only mercy was that, in running to it, she had left the Nubians way behind. Where most of the pursued had milled around and attempted to double back, to circle toward the city, Semple had carried on as straight and as fast as she could, directly into the desert. The ones who had tried to return to Necropolis had been sent bloodily to another place. The curve of the Nubian formation had surrounded them, the horns of the bull had closed, the golden spears went to work, and the victims took their leave of Anubis’s desert, to the pods with a final scream. As far as Semple could observe, she and the rearing atomic cloud were all that remained.

She looked back a number of times, just to make sure all pursuit had ceased, before she felt safe enough to stop running and attempt to catch her breath. It was only when she finally stopped that she realized just how winded she was. She leaned forward, hands on knees, eyes closed, bent double, gasping, with the circulation pounding in her head. Her legs were shaking and threatening to give out on her. For one fearful moment, she wondered if this heralded the onset of another bout of the melting horror, but her body managed to struggle back to normality and she slowly straightened up. For a brief time, this fear of the melting had pushed the influence of the atomic cloud out of her mind. As she reopened her eyes, she half hoped that it might have gone, borne away on some desert wind, but the mushroom of poison vapor was still in front of her, showing no sign of dissipating or even losing its shape. Indeed, the mighty fungoid head, atop its roughly cylindrical trunk, appeared to be expanding still, growing between her and the sun, so that a dark shadow advanced across the blast-blown desert directly toward her. A new impulse suddenly entered her mind. She no longer had to go to the cloud. All she had to do was to wait for the shadow to come to her.

As far as she could tell, the outer edge of the cloud-cast shadow was maybe seventy yards from her, but it was moving quickly closer. It seemed to cover the desert at something well in excess of walking pace, and the seventy yards quickly dwindled to fifty, thirty, twenty-five, and the nearer it came, the more her strength ebbed, leaving her without the will to resist or flee. As it moved inexorably closer to the immediate ground on which she stood, she began to feel almost transparent, as though her very being were ebbing. What was this? Some bizarre new unknown ending? With the shadow just a few feet from her, she felt as though she could no longer breathe; her motor functions spun out of control, she was hot and then cold, her thoughts became randomized, without thread or pattern. She was scattering. She hardly knew who she was, even had doubts as to what she was. And then the shadow touched her and she became a part of the blackness that hid the sun. As a conscious being, Semple ceased.

***

Doc shaded his eyes and looked more closely at the passing pleasure boat. “I see they have their own shipboard entertainment.”

A dancer was performing for a small audience on the quarterdeck of the great white and gold river palace. All but naked, she turned, undulated, and pranced, legs lifted high in mock classic symbolic poses that looked to Jim privately like bullshit, having engaged in some similar bullshit himself back in the days of yore. The dancer’s arms dipped and waved, trailing a long chiffon scarf. Jim grinned at Doc. “Isadora Duncan disciple?”

“It could be the divine Isadora herself.”

“You think so?”

Doc squinted from beneath his hat, looking more closely at the dancer. “It’s too far to tell for sure, but it looks like her. If I just had binoculars powerful enough that I could see her mole, I’d know . . . ”

“You know her?”

“Isadora took a fancy to me once, way back down the road. I recall we spent a memorable three nights in a hot-sheet, yab-yum motel out on one of the caravan routes.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“As a gentleman, I surely can’t elaborate. It did seem, though, even back then, the manner of her death hadn’t done anything to put her off her taste for flowing scarves.”

“Isadora Duncan, huh?”

“Watch your course there, boy.”

They had passed the bigger ship now, but while Jim’s attention had been fixed on the dancer, he had allowed the launch to drift uncomfortably close to its backwash. He quickly adjusted the wheel and then took a final look at the dwindling form of the near-nude dancer. He grinned at Doc. “Three nights, huh?”

Doc pulled down his hat so his eyes were hidden. “Maybe, in some time yet to come, my boy, you’ll take this Semple McPherson to the same place. If you find yourself doing that, ask for a hostess called Shen Wu. She really likes her work.”

Jim didn’t smile. The idea of this woman who might be in his future filled him with both unrequited curiosity and a strange unease. He turned back to steering a straight course and did his best not to think about her. He knew that kind of obsessive thinking about something he could do nothing about was a guaranteed shortcut to neurosis.

While Jim was trying not to think about the mysterious Semple McPherson, Doc drank in the shade of his hat brim. Each in his own way was too absorbed to notice another, smaller appearance on the river. A hundred yards astern of the launch, the black upper lens housing of a submarine’s periscope broke the surface and peered unblinkingly in its direction.

***

“A woman is a better conductor of heat than steel.”

“What?”

“Aluminum is a better conductor of heat than steel.”

“I have to be dreaming.”

“A shaman is a letter seductor to cheat and steal.”

“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”

But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander; not exactly as lonely as a cloud, but equally ethereal. She knew, however, that this wasn’t one of those times.

“A hymen is abetting the reaction to beat and feel.”

“Stop this now!”

Semple seemed to be somewhere underwater, deep water; somewhere in the depths of a deep body of water, and the repeating, distorting, irritating voice had a deep, sewer-pipe, bubbling sound that bounced and came back at her like the ping pulses of sonar. “A dolmen is-”

“I said, stop.”

The repeating irritating voice changed. It suddenly sounded resentful, querulous. “But I go with the hallucination.”

“I’m trying to rid myself of the hallucination.”

Exotic, multicolored warm-water fishes swam all around her; above her head, a large object, perhaps a submarine or an aquatic reptile, moved purposefully between her and the rippling dapple-green light that had to be the surface of the water. Semple had known at once this was a hallucination. If the atomic cloud had actually somehow returned her to a primal sea of origin and rebirth, some unknown parallel of the Great Double Helix, she knew she’d be accepting it with a lot more resignation. In fact, all she wanted was to fight. She wanted to kick out and swim to the surface and scream in fury at whatever fate had precipitated her into this fine new mess. Moreover, if this were the Helix, she wouldn’t be so goddamned thirsty. Despite being entirely immersed, she was parched, her tongue swollen, her lips threatening to crack. She knew that to slake the thirst, all she had to do was open her mouth, but something told her with that first drink she would also drown, and be swept away to the Great Double Helix.

But how could she drown if she had no body? The realizations and revelations were coming thick and fast. In a flash she knew that the raging, illogical underwater thirst was the only corporeal aspect to this entire new episode. She looked down, or rather, she perceived down and saw . . . nothing, no legs to kick, no arms to power herself upward, no body to move. She seemed to be nothing more than a bubble of consciousness; and her consciousness had no buoyancy. All the time she remained submerged and without physical form, she seemed to be sinking deeper, until the light from above became a vestigial thing. The fish took partners, touched fins, and waltzed in these newly plumbed depths, their own luminescence providing passing mirror-ball highlights in their watery ballroom. She might have stopped to admire this circling aquarial tableau had she not been so consumed with fury; and yet the angrier she became, the faster she sank. “What the hell is going on here? Is this supposed to be some kind of torture? If so, what the fuck did I do? Whoever’s doing this, at least have the balls to show your goddamned self!”

This outburst finally took her all the way to the bottom, where she bounced leadenly on surprisingly hard and resilient mud, and then came to rest, an angry and misshapen balloon, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze from a tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Dark, submarine plants undulated around her with the current; she lay, helpless and immobile, like one more piece of discarded jetsam on the bottom of this unholy sea. Surely this wasn’t her final fate? Was she condemned to remain there, unable to do anything but gather silt and watch the fish dance?

“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”

But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander . . .

At the very moment her repeating thoughts began to circle back on themselves, the water miraculously started to fade. The hallucination must have completed its cycle. Her surroundings were increasing insubstantial, and she could feel her body gradually reasserting itself. The sensation was one of rising, going up through the darkness to the light. She was pleased that she wasn’t going to be imprisoned, disembodied, in a sagging, orange plastic sac, but the experience reminded her a little too much of her and Aimee’s death, and that did a lot to temper her relief. This time she was confronted with a new set of illusions, hallucinations, call them what she might. The first arrived in the twilight zone of her ascent. He was a tall, impossibly angular, and scarcely human figure in what looked like a cross between black undertaker’s weeds and white tie and tails. The outfit was completed by a tall stovepipe hat, and the face under that hat was nothing more than a naked skull with glowing coal-ruby eyes. When this bizarre figure moved, it generated flashes of blue electricity. Semple knew she should have been afraid, but somehow she wasn’t-even when the deaths-head face peered into hers so close that she could smell the neglected freezer reek of his breath, and hissed. “Where is Jim Morrison?”

The question made no sense to Semple. “I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”

“I am Dr. Hypodermic and I am looking for Jim Morrison.”

“I just told you, I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”

The naked skull laughed. “You will, my dear, you will.” And with that, it faded away. Body first, then face, ruby eyes remaining long after the rest of it had gone.

She rose on her own for a while longer, until she thought she spotted another figure; but this one remained in the shadows, showing no desire to approach her. For an instant she thought it might be the hooded form of Anubis’s Dream Warden, but she couldn’t be sure. If it was, could he be the author of whatever was happening to her? She had no time to think about it, though. Now angry, nasal, trailer-trash voices were shouting in the gathering nothingness, as though from a great distance, and the things they were saying did not bode well for whatever was next to come.

“Behold the naked harlot.”

“The naked harlot is a trap for the ungodly.”

“The naked harlot is set here as a trap for those who might linger wistfully on the sins of the flesh.”

The ugliness of the tone was one Semple knew well from her life on Earth. She was surfacing among the viciously righteous.

“We must cast her from us.”

Aimee’s people, not hers.

“Let her be driven out and eaten by dogs.”

The frying pan was once again tilting into the fire.

“Stone the whore!”

“In the name of the Lord, stone the whore!”

***

“So are we there yet?”

Jim and Doc had now been drinking for what Jim subjectively conceived of as the entire long afternoon. He was well past his initial elation at being reunited with Holliday and at being rescued from the Jurassic. Bourbon shots with beer chasers had put Jim into a disgruntled discontent. His past was as fragmented as a surrealist quilt and his future looked to promise little more than prolonged degeneration and perversity. Like every drunk knew but usually forgot, introspection and booze never mixed well.

“So how soon do we get where we’re going?”

Doc had declined to answer Jim’s first Bart Simpson challenge, recognizing it as mere alcoholic petulance. When Jim asked a second time, Doc stared at him coldly; he, too, was reflective and grumpy from his own share of onboard drinking. “If you’re going to get fractious and start whining before you’ve even finished your first bottle, I might start to surmise that maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea for me to haul your sorry ass out of the mire back there.”

Jim’s face hardened. “I thought you did it because you owed me.”

Doc’s expression didn’t change, except for his left eye, which took on a dangerous glint. “I didn’t have to volunteer to pay the debt quite so freely, though, did I?”

Jim hadn’t drunk so much that he failed to realize he was drawing close to the line. He was being unreasonable, and maybe a little ill-mannered, and a half-drunk Doc Holliday was hardly the kind of man with whom one copped attitudes. Jim shrugged. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just kinda wondering how long we’re going be on the river.”

“You ought to know by now, kid. All time is relative.”

The boat journey, which Jim was starting to view as an extended and now largely unwanted Disneyland ride, was getting tired. He’d already seen plenty of water in the swamp, and he was more than ready for some hot nights, and at least the illusion of being in a big city. His outlandish encounter with the alien creations Epiphany and Devora was far enough behind him to start him thinking about women. Images of women in the sexual abstract, long legs, flashing eyes, ruby lips, swaying hips, curly pubic hair, high-heeled shoes, cries and whispers, and revealing, although not yet specified, costumes-all flickered beckoningly at the peripheries of his mind, eager to lead him to the edge of that old-fashioned temptation and the urge to be elsewhere. He couldn’t believe that Doc, from what he knew of him, wasn’t feeling the same way, too.

It didn’t help that the river had taken a decided turn for the depressing. The broccoli-colored jungle had been left far behind; now they were traveling in a corrupted Arizona, between tall, hollowly echoing cliffs of unhealthy sponge-yellow sandstone. In the shallows the water ran so thick with that silt that it gave these margins the look of diseased urine. Most of the animal life seemed to have gone, except for the buzzards and ravens that constantly circled overhead and, in the few patches of comparatively clear water, the swift outline of large, sinister fish. Here and there, on the river bottom, Jim could make out what looked to be masses of large orange spheres, angry and misshapen balloons, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze-in-a-tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Jim could only suppose they were egg sacs, laid, or maybe spawned, by some toadlike river life he had no desire to meet, undesirable and very large.

Jim’s overall impression was that the higher they moved on the river, the less benign its aspect. As if to make this perfectly clear, a galley straight out of Ben Hur had labored past them a little earlier, complete with sweating, groaning slaves, whip-wielding overseers, a relentless and muscular drummer, an aroma of shit and misery, and an obese, toga-clad Nero figure lounging on the quarterdeck with body-slaves peeling grapes for him. Where in its first, jungle-fringed reaches the Styx had been close to idyllic, it was now turning blighted and grim. Doc had stared at the wretched fantasy trireme as it creaked past, but had not felt moved to comment. Both he and Jim were lapsing into long bouts of silence.

For Jim, real confirmation of the downhill slide arrived when the launch passed the huge tail fin of a downed B-52, sticking up from a roughly cylindrical tangle of submerged and rusting wreckage. The huge jet appeared to have crashed, long ago, halfway up the cliff wall and then dropped, smashing down in what must have been a spectacular impact at the water’s edge. What Jim couldn’t figure was how any pilot would have been able to pull off such a maneuver. The old nuclear bomber would have needed the performance vectors of a UFO to make it down into a canyon that, at its narrowest point, was only slightly wider than the plane’s wingspan. The presence of a B-52, though, was enough of an uncomfortable memory, straight out of Vietnam, to make Jim lose any remaining enthusiasm for aimlessly rolling on the river.

Even the weather was taking a turn for the negative. In the shadowy places, where the sandstone walls rose to a hundred feet or more, the river grew chilly and a dank veil of cheap Bela Lugosi fog shrouded the water. What little sky was visible had darkened from blue to an implacable slate gray, and then became increasingly obscured by ominous near-black clouds.

“Are those rain clouds?”

“Smoke.”

“Smoke?”

“Smoke from Gehenna.”

Jim straightened up. “Gehenna?” He rose from the seat cushions in the stern of the launch and lurched toward the bow. “I have to see this.”

Doc was taking his turn at the helm, making him once again irritable. “It’s quite a sight, I promise you that.”

Jim looked up at the dark clouds overhead. “It is smoke.”

“That’s what I told you.”

“How soon till we see Gehenna itself?”

“You want to take the wheel for a spell?

Jim nodded. He knew it was the least he could do if he wanted to get back into Holliday’s good graces. “Sure.”

The two men changed places and Doc sagged back into the cushions, reaching for a drink. “Just take us around the curve nice and easy, and for fuck’s sake don’t go running us into an oil rig or something else up there in the mist.”

“Oil rigs?”

“I don’t know. They look like oil rigs. Big metallic shit, planted on legs on the middle of the river. God only knows what folks do on ’em.” Doc scowled. “All I know is we don’t want to be stuck anywhere in the immediate vicinity of that smoking garbage dump they call Gehenna. Hell no. That’s something we can absolutely do without. You read me?”

“I read you.”

“And while you’re at it, try not to hit any mines.”

“Mines?”

Doc ignored Jim’s expression of surprise and concern. “You sure you’re not too drunk to be doing that?”

Jim quickly shook his head. He wanted to know about the mines. “There are mines on the Styx?”

Doc made a dismissive gesture. “On this stretch? No. Not too many, and most of them are back down near the swamps and on into the delta. Leftovers from the Barbiturate Wars. But you do see one bobbing past every now and again. Let me know it you spot one.”

Jim took a deep breath. “Don’t worry. I will.”

The prospect of mines proved to be a highly sobering one. Jim was suddenly seeing single again, taking deep gulps of river air and giving all his attention to the navigation of the launch. It never ceased to amaze him how, since his death, some things had become so much easier. It was possible, if need be, to come out of the effect of intoxicants almost with a snap of the fingers. Of course, other things had grown nearly impossible. The writing of poetry was a case in point; Jim had reached the stage of wondering if his loss of creativity was caused, in some part, by the equal loss of any need to hedge his bets against death. Did other artists lose interest, on this side of the veil, in what had previously been the driving force in their lives? It hardly seemed so. Whoever had conjured a B-52 into the bottom of a canyon had to be up for some conceptual rock and roll sculpture pranking. And then there was this Phibes, with his seagoing wedding cake. Maybe Jim would have to fess up and admit he’d simply blown himself out back lifeside.

Blown out or not, self-deluded or not, this wasn’t the time to be thinking about it. Following the curve of the river was a little harder than Doc Holliday had made it seem. High formidable cliffs loomed on either side of the narrowest channel they had yet encountered. The Styx had carved deep into the landscape, producing cliff walls with high curved overhangs, and ran fast and choppy, creating small white wavelets as it went into each tight turn. The launch, although powerful, had to run hard to make headway against the stream and repeatedly bucked the flow. Jim had to use both hands to maintain control of the wheel and keep the craft on a straight course. Any serious deviation would have been treated by the river as an invitation to hurl the boat into the rock face and smash its deep varnished panels into matchwood.

“You all right up there, Jim lad?”

“Shipshape and Bristol fashion, Skipper.”

“You just keep it that way.”

“She needs a firm hand now and again.”

“Don’t they all, kid.”

“You say Gehenna’s just around the bend.”

“You just focus on the firm hand, boy. You’ll see Gehenna in all its gory glory soon enough.”

***

“Stone the whore!”

At first Semple was blind. The only information she was receiving was aural and tactile. She knew she had returned to her familiar body, which was of some comfort, but this was offset by the indignity of being stretched out on her back, totally without clothes, on hard stony dirt, staring straight up into a blindingly bright sun in a dangerously clear sky. She was covered by a fine layer of dust that even packed her nose, mouth, and ears, as though, in temporal reality, she had been lying there for quite some time. She also sensed that a number of people were standing over her. Presumably the ones who were talking about stoning the whore. It was possible that she wasn’t the whore in question, but she wasn’t holding out too much hope. Luck had hardly been with her on this adventure. Pain shot through the muscles of her arm as she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. She really had been lying there a long time. As her vision gradually returned, she could make out dark shapes leaning into her field of vision, peering down at her through the sundogs and colored retinal burn. They were talking about her.

“I say get her on her feet and whip her out to the badlands.”

“Stoning her would be quicker.”

“She’s right. We can’t waste any time today. The Patriarch is in a foul temper. He wants to make twenty miles by nightfall.”

One voice had a particularly snide and insinuating tone. “Maybe he’ll change his mind when he gets a look at her. A good punishment could be just the thing to improve his mood.”

As Semple’s eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the darker shapes began to assume form. Now she was looking up into a circle of faces that were as coarse, malformed, and ignorant as any that could be found in any part of even the darkest backwoods of Arkansas or Mississippi. Narrow, suspicious eyes peered down at her from under low brows and lumpy foreheads. A hand came toward her, but she ducked away from it with a snarl. “You won’t touch me if you know what’s good for you.”

The hand jerked back. Just as on Earth, Semple thought, trash was trash and you had to show it who was boss. Despite all of her disorientation and naked vulnerability, she had to take the offensive. Whatever might happen to her here, it could hardly be worse than what she had been subjected to at the hands of Anubis, Fat Ari, Mengele, and the rest. She was heartily sick of being shoehorned into a whimpering victim role. This time, she’d be damned if she was going to take it lying down, literally or otherwise. She snarled again and the circle around her backed off. The snarling routine seemed to be working, so she tried it a third time, with even more feeling, using it as a cover while she rolled over to get her hands and knees under so she could spring to her feet with a quick leap. As soon as she was on two legs, she dropped into a simian defensive crouch. She knew she probably made a scary enough sight to begin with, and she hoped that behaving like a feral thing might spook them entirely. If these fools believed she was some kind of desert djinni, some banshee she-devil, let them. Just as long as they stayed good and terrified, they’d be much less likely to start reaching for the rocks they’d seemed so gung-ho to start hurling a few moments earlier.

She turned slowly; snorting through her nose with what she hoped was sufficiently demonic ferocity. It certainly seemed to be working. The circle around her retreated another couple of paces. She continued to turn, acting every inch the cornered succubus, carefully observing all the while. The small crowd was completely composed of women, although, a short distance away, a number of men and a flock of scrawny, black-faced sheep stood staring; dealing with she-demons was women’s work. The women in question were possibly the ugliest and most depressing collection of broads she had ever encountered. Perhaps she could somehow turn this to her advantage. If these horrors were a representative sample of local womanhood, the men might well be drawn to their sheep; given the look of the men, the sheep were the ones truly getting the shitty end of the deal. And Semple knew whereof she spoke. The camp meetings they had run when she and Aimee were alive and one, starting out on the rocky road to fame and fortune in the evangelism racket, had attracted more than their fair share of the benightedly repugnant. This bunch clearly thought of themselves as the Children of Israel in a wilderness straight out of the Classics Illustrated Book of Exodus, but to her they resembled nothing more than a bunch of Ozark inbreds without even the benefit of dilapidated Ford trucks. She had managed their kind before; if they didn’t immediately turn violent, she could manage them again.

The women came in all shapes and sizes, from eating disorder blubber to rawboned and desiccated. They were all dressed in cheap, coarse, Old Testament homespun, but their faces made them look like Elvis’s educationally challenged cousins on his daddy’s side: sour, mean, and ignorant, with built-up heads of resentment that stretched back so many generations it was encoded in their DNA. One who was a little braver than the rest, a tall streak of sour vinegar, turned and faced her companions. “I say stone her now. Before she can put a hex on the lot of us.”

Semple laughed nastily. “You’re all double-hexed already. You’ll have boils all over your bodies within the hour.”

She hoped this would put the fear into them. It seemed to work on some, who stopped glaring at her and began nervously peering inside the loose caftans, in search of latent blemishes. The tall woman, however, was not one of these. Semple had miscalculated. The threat only made her more determined. “How many times do I have to tell you? Stone the abomination, whatever it is!”

The tall woman appeared to possess a certain natural authority; after only a few seconds of hesitation, a majority of the others were bending down, reaching for rocks, pleased that someone was doing their thinking for them, and that the thinking involved direct and easy action. They started moving back, widening the circle so they wouldn’t hit each other when the boulders commenced to fly. This wasn’t going Semple’s way. Trying somehow to crack this reality, Semple looked around wildly, but she knew it was impossible. Dull, fearful, and brutish they might be, but there were too many women gathered in this place for her to erase them with her mind. They didn’t even need the sheep’s help to keep this bit of stinking desert intact. She didn’t want to believe she was going to be stoned back to the Great Double Helix by a bunch of primitive hick herdspersons, but it sure looked that way. If worse came to worst, was there any way to avoid the pain? She had to find an answer, and soon. The women were already winding up to throw. But then, miraculously, the cavalry charged to the rescue. There came an impossibly deep and booming voice: “AND WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE LORD IS GOING ON HERE?”

The voice resonated with fundamentalist and wholly phony electronic bass reverb. A new player had entered the auditorium. The women dropped their rocks, panic-stricken. As one they raised their right arms and signed an invisible circle in the air, hands arranged with index and middle finger extended, much in the same manner as a Pope blessing the multitude. Later Semple would find out that this was the so-called Sign of the Eternal Continuation, with which the followers of the Patriarch were expected to pay tribute to their leader. In other parts, she would also learn, it was known as the Universal Sign of the Donut. This new player was close to seven feet tall, with wild white hair, flowing robes, the beard of a prophet, and a carved wooden staff in his right hand. He’d had the good grace not to make himself look exactly like Charlton Heston, but he wasn’t far off. Semple knew this had to be the Patriarch. Before she’d agreed to go on Aimee’s fool’s errand, she’d been aware that some damn silly demented Moses was on the loose in the wilds, pretending to look for the Promised Land with a bunch of retard followers. She heard he staged orgies just so he could get his kicks smiting the sinners. If this wasn’t he, it had to be another exactly like him.

The Patriarch acknowledged the women’s salute with a curt motion of the staff and repeated his demand. “I ASKED YOU, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?”

The women avoided his eyes; not even the tall one managed to muster the courage to answer, so Semple, deciding she really had nothing to lose, placed both hands on her hips and adopted a pose of nude, if dusty, defiance. “This bunch of weary, sheep-cuckolded hags was trying to get up the nerve to stone me to death.”

The Patriarch slowly looked her up and down. Although he maintained a pose of righteous outrage, Semple saw something else in his eyes that was far from righteous and all too familiar. The son of a bitch was as horny as the next guy. Maybe hornier. As Patriarch, he was probably above seeking the comfort of sheep. Catching on, she posed like a cheap pinup. “You must be this Moses character I’ve been hearing about.”

“INDEED I AM MOSES, THE PROPHET OF THE LORD THY GOD, AND WHAT MANNER OF NAKED ABOMINATION ARE YOU?” Without waiting for an answer, Moses waved an arm in the direction of the now-silent women. “BRING LINEN TO COVER THIS THING!”

A short, fat woman hurried away and quickly returned with a rough, homespun caftan like the ones she and the others were wearing. She seemed frightened to approach Semple; only when Moses glared at her did she dare to step forward, eyes averted, to hand the garment over. Semple snatched it from her, as though impatient with all the fear and hesitation. It was probably the ugliest piece of apparel that Semple had ever been expected to wear, and before putting it on, she inspected it slowly and carefully. Although the same dun color as the desert, it seemed reasonably clean and free of lice, so finally she slipped it over her head and turned around as though modeling the thing for Moses. “Is that better? You’d rather have me clothed and shapeless?”

Moses seemed a little unnerved by Semple’s pirouette, but covered himself by roaring even louder, “I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”

Semple was determined not to be intimidated by Moses’ crude bombast. She’d heard enough voice-amplification tricks in the court of Anubis not to be blown away by this fool’s bass boost and slap-back echo. She stood her ground and inspected the Patriarch with an expression that verged on insolence. “Is this how you treat an unfortunate traveler who has fallen to misfortune in the wilderness?”

Clearly Moses wasn’t accustomed to being addressed in this manner. Most of his followers were probably too dumb and brainwashed to speak unless spoken to directly. “I DEMAND TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”

“You think you might lower the volume a little? I really find it very hard to conduct any kind of conversation under these circumstances. And while we’re at it, if someone doesn’t offer me some water, I’m liable to die of thirst and dehydration before you find out anything about me at all. I always assumed the giving of water, even to a stranger, was common courtesy among all desert peoples, no matter how primitive.”

This gave Moses the easy out of barking another order. “FETCH HER WATER!”

Semple now knew she had the measure of this biblical blowhard. He didn’t want to see her stoned any more than she did. At least not until he’d had a chance to get her on her own and see if she was up for a little patriarchal bodily tribute. And yet he seemed uncertain how to pull if off with all the women, plus the men and the sheep, watching his every move. Don’t worry, Moses my boy, she thought. I’ll give you any help you need. Just get me away from these potential rock throwers.

This time a different woman waddled quickly off to do the Patriarch’s bidding. When she returned with an earthenware pitcher, she, too, shied away from eye contact. The water tasted brackish, but it was cool and wet, and just what Semple’s parched throat gasped for. She drank slowly and with care, however. She was well aware that drinking too much, too fast under these conditions could cause all manner of physical problems, and she wasn’t about to take any chances. She also suspected that, among the Moses Family, water was strictly rationed. If so, another way by which she might assert her separateness and superiority over this badland trash presented itself. When she’d finished drinking, she poured the rest of the contents of the pitcher slowly and deliberately over her head. As she’d expected, the women let out a collective gasp at her cavalier attitude to what, for them, was a precious fluid. She ignored their response and handed the container back to the woman with a satisfied sigh. “God, that was good.”

Moses immediately rounded on her with a bellow. “YOU TAKE THE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN?”

Semple looked at Moses as though she were starting to lose patience. “Will you get off it? I know exactly what you are. And I’m not impressed by all your bellowing and bluster.”

For a moment, she thought she might have overplayed her hand. Moses looked around at his followers as though he were going to give the order to let the stoning begin all over again, but instead he merely waved an angry arm. “DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE WORK TO DO? GET ABOUT YOUR ALLOTTED TASKS AND STOP STANDING AROUND GAPING. THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO SEE HERE.”

Semple nodded to herself. Good thinking, pal. Send the common herd back to their business so we can get down to ours. As the crowd of women reluctantly moved away, he turned back to Semple. “NOW WILL YOU TELL ME WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE?”

At the sound of his voice, many of the followers stopped in their tracks and stared at the exchange. Some of the sheep bleated uneasily and Semple sighed. “It really might be an idea to lower the volume a bit. It doesn’t impress me and makes it hard to retain our privacy.”

For an instant Moses looked as though he were about to strike her down with his staff. Lust and the need to maintain authority stood conflicted. Then lust won out and he lowered the staff, at the same time killing the echo and reverb. He took a deep breath. It seemed he’d been playing the Wrath of God for so long that normal conversation was hard for him. “So what are you?”

Semple half smiled, restrainedly coquettish. “All you needed to do was ask me nicely.”

His anger started to boil again. “Who are you and what are you doing in my desert?”

“I’m just an unfortunate refugee from cannibalism and fornication.”

Moses blinked. “Are you serious?”

“I just escaped from of the city of Necropolis. You know about Necropolis ?”

“Of course I know about Necropolis.”

“And its dog-god Anubis?”

“May his name be cursed.” The response was an unthinking reaction. Moses was intrigued. Semple moved a little closer to the Patriarch, as though she wanted to confide in him. She was aware that the women were still covertly watching. “Anubis just let off one of his dirty little atom bombs, except this one was a bit bigger and more complicated than I suspect he anticipated. I’m surprised you didn’t see the flash or feel the shock.”

Moses’ face stiffened. “We saw the flash and felt the shock. The goats panicked and the herdsmen have only just finished rounding them up.”

Semple smiled knowingly and gestured to the tribe. “That must have been a hard one to explain to the faithful. They don’t look like they’re quite up to the concept of nuclear technology.”

“I told them it was Lucifer spawning demons from the lightning.”

Semple laughed and nodded. “I guess that’s close enough.”

“You’re one of Anubis’s constructs?”

“I’m nobody’s construct, pal. I was only in Necropolis because, out of the goodness of my heart, I went there on an errand for my sister.”

Moses looked at her sharply. “SISTER?”

Unintentionally, he had put the echo and reverb on at full power. Semple clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t do that!”

Moses cut them off. “I’m sorry. It’s a habit. What about your sister?”

Semple realized she might have said too much. “Nothing, she’s just a sister.”

Moses’ eyes narrowed and he shot her a sly, sideways look. “You’re not Aimee Semple McPherson, are you?”

Now it was Semple’s turn to take a deep breath. “I’m Semple McPherson. Aimee and I separated a while ago. I guess you could say we used to be in the same racket as you.”

Moses frowned, then stared speculatively a Semple. “I think we’d better take this conversation to my tent. It’s a little too public out here. I have to keep up my image in front of the rubes.”

Semple kept her face expressionless. His guard was down now and he was revealing himself for the con artist he really was. This faux Moses could talk about rubes, but she had him as hooked as any carny mark on the midway.

***

His first sight of Gehenna was enough to make Jim wish that he was drunk again. Even before visual contact, the stench that wafted down the river, the stink of punishment and pain, of violated bodies, ozone, sulfuric acid and ammonia, hot blood and decaying flesh, burning hair and unidentifiable toxic pollution, was an olfactory cocktail that boded the worst kind of ill. With it came an amalgam of noise that was equally daunting: massed voices cried and lamented in a seamless howl of screams, shouting, and psychotic laughter. The human wailing was accompanied by a counterpoint of growls and barking that had to come from the throats of things so evil they could hardly qualify as animal. Underpinning it all was the deep rumble and straining grind of unholy massed machinery. And yet the sound and smell were only mild precursors of the full visual spectacle. Hieronymous Bosch was made real with a brutality that leapt quantum measures beyond any mere painting’s imagined nastiness. Those who dwelled there had come to suffer in a manner unimaginable even to one with Jim’s deviant background.

In a massive, smoke-filled crevasse carved out of the living sandstone like an axe wound in the rock made by some god or spectacular giant, creaking and straining mechanisms of suffering labored at their infinitely repeated tasks. While flames belched from fissures in the rocks, pistons rose and fell and steam leaked from huge driving engines. Revolving cam shafts and greased axles turned cogs of wood and brass and long spiral worm gears that, in their turn, caused lacerating steel blades to rise and fall and huge hammers to drive iron nails into writhing flesh. Countless victims were bound, strapped, and secured to gallows, gibbets, and structures so bizarre in the contortions they inflicted on the human frame that Jim was unable to give names to them. Long, slow-rolling conveyor belts moved the damned from one automated theater of cruelty to the next, in endless cycles of relentless automation. Huge cauldrons steamed and bubbled at a slow simmer, each filled to the brim with a foul stew on the surface of which bobbed the shrieking, sobbing heads of submerged humans. Others were crushed, over and over, by huge stone rollers, while more were continuously flogged with lashes as long as the leather traces of teamster wagons.

Although the mechanical structures presented the impression that Gehenna was a dark clockwork universe of meaningless repeating torture, it had no real precision about it. Its mechanisms strained and shuddered; elbows in its maze of pipework leaked steam and dripped boiling water and oil. Its nooks and crannies were thronged with masses of wailing humanity being subjected to less systemized acts of fiendishness. Jim watched while what was left of a man, flesh all but stripped from his bones, was dragged along a dripping, reeking catwalk over one of the cauldrons. A barbed fishhook pierced his rib cage, and the rope attached to the hook was dragged behind a blood-spattered golf cart being driven by a pair of grinning demons. Other victims were enmeshed in tumbleweed tangles of rusty razor wire, while guffawing reptile things, and other strange creatures that looked to be entirely composed of leather, laughed at their agonizingly futile efforts to free themselves.

High on the sides of the crevasse, shackled work gangs of naked, filthy men and women labored, quarrying with picks and shovels, balancing on impossibly narrow ledges or perched on rickety scaffolding, actually attempting to enlarge the valley of pain by the strain of their muscles and the sweat of their brows, while other demons and reptile creatures encouraged them with long black bullwhips. At regular intervals, a worker would lose his or her footing, slip, and fall. Either the unfortunate would be saved by those linked to him on the particular chain gang, or else all would be dragged down, plunging to the rocks and fires below, to the great merriment and amusement of the demons and reptiles in charge.

Gehenna even seemed to have developed it own unique flora and fauna. Amid the machinery and instruments of pain, huge misshapen fungoid growths reared corpse-white and unhealthy, as large as trees. Other things Jim didn’t recognize, like damaged mutant eggs with traceries of poisonous green and purple veins dappling their shells, grew out of the charred black soil between the flame gushers and fire pits, ranging in size from just a few inches to six or seven feet at their widest diameter. Huge rats and scrawny, red-eyed dogs made their own contribution to the misery of the valley’s human denizens, as was to be expected in such a nightmare landscape, like the crows, ravens, and vultures that circled overhead and settled to peck at the miserable undying carrion. The presence of the demons, reptile men, and leather creatures also conformed to a certain hellishly medieval logic. What Jim didn’t understand were the impossible bird-headed women, the bat-winged toads, the hogs with fangs and flippers, or the animated slime that constantly shaped and reshaped itself. They all seemed to have been included as nothing more than horrific additional background.

Once he had taken in enough of Gehenna, Jim turned and looked at Doc. Jaded as he might be, he still felt sickened by the entire wretched panorama of this hideous garden of delights. It bore too uncomfortable a resemblance to one of his old earthside nightmares. “Jesus Christ, talk about the horror and the horror.”

Doc smiled sourly. “You can’t go up the river without meeting it in one shape or form. Ask 01’ Joe Conrad . . . or poor Marlon Brando.”

“Every one of those dumb suffering bastards could leave if they wanted to. Right?”

“That kinda depends. If they’re only set dressing, they haven’t got a prayer; strictly speaking, though, nobody does anything they don’t subconsciously want to do. Those who went there by choice stay there by choice.”

Jim shook his head. “Too much old-time religion at an early age can just eat some folks all up.”

Doc himself was also staring into the Valley of Gehenna that was now mercifully starting to retreat astern. “A little Bible is a dangerous thing.”

“Guilt and the need for punishment.”

Doc agreed with a sigh. “Fortunately neither you nor I, my friend, are burdened by either.”

No sooner had Doc spoken than three dark shapes detached themselves from a black-rusted wrought-iron pier that jutted out into the river at one point at the water’s edge. Doc frowned uneasily and gestured to Jim. “Now, what the hell do we have here?”

Jim squinted in the direction that Doc was pointing. “I don’t know, but I don’t like the look of them. I also don’t like it that they seem to be coming after us.”

Doc turned in his seat and reached under his coat. “Better open the throttle all the way, boy. I don’t like the look of this, either.”

Jim didn’t comment or argue. He just did as he was instructed. The Gun That Belonged to Elvis was in Doc’s right hand, and the older man was clearly not treating this as any joke, coincidence, or false alarm. Under the full power of its twin diesels, the launch surged ahead, but in the reaches of the Styx that flowed past Gehenna, the current was fast and not going their way. Jim glanced back. The slipstream that came with the increased speed whipped his hair across his face. He took a hand from the wheel and pushed it out of his eyes. The black shapes were gaining on them. Jim could now make out that their pursuers were small, hunched, ring-tailed gargoyles riding Jet Skis, two to each craft. Presumably the one in front was doing the driving, but the function of the passenger had yet to reveal itself. That revelation, however, wasn’t long in coming. The rear gargoyle riding the Jet Ski that was closest to them started swinging a steel grappling hook at the end of a long line. Clearly the intention was to intercept and board the launch. Jim, still holding the throttle wide open and zigzagging as best he could to make things hard for the gargoyle cowboy swinging the hook, glanced back at Doc. “What do those things want?”

“My guess is they’re recruiters looking for new meat for the mill.”

“I thought everyone was there by choice.”

“Supposedly, but I guess the locals aren’t above dragging in the odd unsuspecting and weary traveler for a little extra amusement. In these parts, nothing is written in stone.”

The gargoyle’s most recent cast had only missed the stern of the boat by a matter of a foot or so, and Jim spun the wheel so they looped and dipped across the full width of the river. “I’m sure as shit not going to Gehenna.”

“I’m with you there, kid. Hold her steady for a minute so I can do something about this.”

While Jim watched the river, and held the launch on as straight and steady a course as he could manage. Doc took careful aim with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis, but the boat was still bouncing enough to make shooting at a moving target highly problematic. Then Jim heard one explosion, followed immediately by a second and third. Jim looked back and the three Jet Skis had vanished. All that remained was some scattered flotsam and smoke on the water. Jim grinned. “You’re one motherfucker of a shot, Doc Holliday.”

Jim had expected Doc to look at least mildly pleased with himself, but the gunfighter’s face was troubled. “Normally I wouldn’t argue with you about that, but the truth is I never fired a single round.”

“What are saying? What happened to those things?”

“Something else blew them up. Something under the water. I had nothing to do with it.”

***

Aimee McPherson had not emerged from her locked and barred sanctuary for the equivalent of a full three days. After two more inexplicable fainting fits, she was convinced that her nuns and even some of the seraphim and angels were looking at her with increasingly less guarded speculation. She was certain they were secretly discussing whether or not their leader, Divine Mother, and virtual Godhead might be beginning to lose control of her powers and even her grasp on reality.

In the beginning it had been concern and anger over Semple’s refusal to communicate. Next had come the unexplainable intrusions: the cartoon rodents, the sea monster, and the UFO. After that, matters had turned inward, attacking her directly. First a growing pain in her stomach, and an increasing shortness of breath. These had been followed by headaches and double vision; finally there were the fits. The first attack had come out on the terrace, in the open, while walking with her nuns. She had staggered and reeled, hurting and disorientated, with agonizingly white light blazing in her head. The second of these fits, mercifully, had come in private with none of the nuns looking on. That time, the white light was replaced by a terrifying sense of drowning that had left her gasping for air like a goldfish that had flopped from its bowl.

The third had been the worst of all. She had been going over the daily records with three of the senior accounting nuns when she found herself in the grip of what she could only describe-and she wasn’t even accustomed to using such terms-as a violent, all-convulsing, grand mal orgasm. While the stunned nuns looked on, Aimee had jerked to her feet, tottered a few quivering steps, and fallen to her knees. She had then proceeded to roll on her back, twitching and contorting, mouth open, eyes screwed shut, pelvis arching upward, all the while gasping, snarling, screaming, calling on God and Jesus, talking in tongues, and finally repeating the two phrases, “Fuck me, you bastard! Fuck me until I die!” over and over like some unholy obscene mantra. After that she had passed out cold for an indeterminate time, only to awaken and find a gathering of a half dozen of the sisterhood making preparations for a full-scale exorcism.

Doing her best to cover her fear and confusion, she had jumped to her feet and attempted a stammering explanation that it had been nothing more than a spiritual visitation. The nuns clearly hadn’t believed a word of it and exchanged significant glances as she’d fled to the sanctuary of her private quarters, certain that what she had experienced was some ghastly print-through of her sister having sex. She should never have trusted Semple in the first place. Now she knew for sure that her sister was using the mission on which she’d been dispatched as an excuse to conduct some pornographic libertine’s grand tour.

Although the fits had been the worst of it, they were by no means the only signs that all was not well in her Heaven. It actually seemed as though the structure were starting to fall apart. Initially it had been only a matter of angels shedding the odd feather, or one or two bluebirds lying feet up, cartoon-dead on the terrace that overlooked the lake. Then two of the Scotch pines on the headland on the far side of the water had succumbed to some mysterious and uninvited tree disease and now stood leafless, sere and dead. The indigo of the water itself and the ultramarine of the sky faded at regular intervals to drab shades of somber gray. The wind seemed always to be blowing from Golgotha, making Heaven fetid with the reek of crucifixion. The once-immaculate grass that ran down to the edge of the lake was now patchy, unkempt. Dark unhealthy mold was growing on parts of the temple on the promontory; the diaphanous virgins had all but stopped dancing and spent most of their time on their hands and knees shooting craps.

The intrusions had also come back. After the UFO, there had been something of a lull as Aimee merely suffered. Then disturbingly abstract cloud formations started drifting across the once-idyllic vista; in the middle of one dour afternoon, a massed formation of black, 1930s-style, three-engined bombing planes, carrying sinister death’s-head insignia on their wings and fuselages, had growled overhead and disappeared beyond the same heliotrope ice-cream mountains whence the flying saucer had come.

With the fits and the bombers, Aimee had reached a kind of breaking point. She had to get away from it all, go into seclusion until she could find a way to reimpose some measure of normality. The chamber in which Aimee had isolated herself was a perfect gray cube, oppressively small and punitively bare, with just a straw sleeping pallet on the hard stone floor, a knotted scourge hanging from a nail driven into the wall, and an overhead light so intense that it made relaxation impossible. It had been designed as a place for self-mortification and introspection, but neither of these seemed to be doing Aimee any good. She had spent the first day alternating between flagellation and lamentation, but even with her bared back bloody from repeated self-thrashings with the scourge no relief came. No insight or enlightenment, no peace of mind or redemption, just an ongoing fury at Semple. Where was her sister? What was she doing?

On the second day, in an attempt to answer that question, Aimee had conjured a television in the hope of picking up some ether-born image of her sister, but even that refused to come out right. She had hoped for a modest Sony Trinitron, but what materialized was a dubious piece of highly deviant equipment with exposed circuitry, a weird triangular screen, and no remote. No matter how many times she sent it back and tried again, it always returned the same. Finally, in exasperation, she turned it on, hoping it would do the trick. Even in that, the thing failed her. She found she had no way to tune it or even surf the channels. All it seemed able to do was flip through an endless sequence of random soundless images at rock video speed-an atomic explosion; a parade of some kind; giant ants in the process of destroying a gas station; some lewd TV show with naked young men and women being paraded down a catwalk; a black and white Philip Morris cigarette commercial; grainy sadomasochistic porno; an unshaven man in leather pants and a dirty shirt struggling through a swamp in the company of a small mammal; the same man with an older individual on a boat on a river; what appeared to be the interior of some potentate’s harem; a scene from Bewitched featuring Agnes Moorehead as Endora; giant black men armed with gold spears attacking a crowd in a cloud of dust; a public hanging; black-faced sheep wandering in the desert and drinking at a water hole.

Then, after much more of the same, and to Aimee’s total shock and horror, the headlong MTV imagery halted and held on a lingering long shot of Semple. Aimee had been hoping to catch a glimpse of Semple, but this was hardly the glimpse that she needed. Her sister was spread-eagled on a bed, in what looked to be a large and very well appointed tent, locked in a furious, passionate coupling beneath a tall man with an almost perfect body and the face of a 1950s movie actor. Suddenly sound cut in, deafeningly loud in the confines of the bare cell. “Fuck me, you bastard! Fuck me until I die!” over and over in lewd and rhythmic repetition. Aimee recognized them as the selfsame obscenities she herself had mouthed during her seizure; she bit deep into her lip, drawing blood but saying nothing. She only began to scream when Semple, pausing between eager pelvic trusts, looked directly at whatever served as a camera and winked lasciviously at Aimee. “Hi, sis. Wish you were here!”

***

“Do you have a cigarette?”

Semple lay back heavy-eyed, her breathing slowly returning to normal. How long would it be until she could once again have sex just for amusement? She was getting more than a little weary of being forced into positions where she could only save her ass by giving it up to the local number-one bull goose freak. First Anubis, now this seven-foot streak of Old Testament self-indulgence. To be strictly truthful, though, she had to admit that having sex with the self-created Moses was hardly a chore. He had been appreciative and seemed at least marginally to care if his partner had a good time.

Obviously, leading this tribe of disgruntled Bible Belters around the desert had afforded him little in the way of protracted romance, and when he’d first taken Semple to his tent and watched her wash the worst of the desert dust from her body, he had become positively cross-eyed with lust. Not that she had given him a chance to go any other way. She had stood flagrantly naked in the large porcelain bowl that he had thoughtfully provided, using water so freely that the parched tribe outside would have been scandalized to witness the display. At the same time she had recounted, in very matter-of-fact terms, an edited version of her encounters with Anubis, culminating in her escape from Necropolis. The contrast between her precise narrative and the sensually slow and suggestive way she moved his borrowed washcloth over her bare skin, paying particularly loving attention to her breasts, buttocks, and inner thighs, had robbed Moses of all biblical reason. Before she had even had a chance to dry herself off, he had picked her up bodily and carried her to his large and highly comfortable traveling bed, laying her atop the silk sheets, fur rugs, and embroidered cushions.

Forty-five very relative minutes later, Semple found herself satiated, probably bruised, and fighting off a major craving for nicotine. About the only thing that spoiled this otherwise satisfactory picture was an irrational impression that somehow Aimee had been watching her and Moses fucking. It was a feeling like the old days, when the two of them had been one, and Semple had brought home sailors or cowboys; Aimee had pretended to vacate the body, but got her kicks just the same. Moses lay flat on his back, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling, a smile of patriarchal satisfaction playing at the corners of his mouth. When she asked him for a cigarette, he opened his eyes and he smiled. “Under the prevailing criteria, cigarettes won’t be invented for another five thousand years.”

“Are you telling me you don’t have any? This tent hardly conforms to any five-thousand-year-old criteria.”

And indeed it didn’t. Compared to the wretchedness endured by the faithful outside, the interior of their leader’s tent was chock-full of goodies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The atmosphere was chill, as though cooled by a hidden and silent air conditioner. Books and magazines littered small folding tables, a portable refrigerator and a water fountain stood in one corner of the rectangular bedouin structure, while Moorish hangings and Persian rugs provided a surprisingly decorative touch. Semple could only wonder which of the poor ignorant bastards outside had the unenviable task of toting all this stuff across the desert when the tribe traveled. Semple also noticed that there were an inordinate number of clocks and other timepieces scattered around the place, from hourglasses to ultramodern digital space chronometers, but she was too burned out to start conjecturing on Moses’ time fetish.

Moses had leaned over and was rummaging among a collection of stuff on a bedside table. When he found what he was looking for, it turned out to be a pack of Lucky Strikes with the pre–World War II vintage red and green pack. He shook one loose, tapped it on his thumbnail, and put it between her lips. Her mouth twisted into deliberate tough-gal angles around the unfiltered cigarette. “So light me.”

Semple knew the only way to deal with the likes of this Moses was to give as good as she got, if not better. She had, of course, come across plenty like him before. All those traveling preachers in the old days had been just the same. In public they’d preach hellfire, damnation, family and moral purity, but back at the hotel, they’d want nothing more than to drink prohibition needle gin and do the eagle rock all night long with two or three or more professional sinners or amateur enthusiasts; and, being natural performers, with a performer’s need to please the crowd, they could usually muster as much style and grace as this Moses. After a little more rummaging, he came up with a book of matches with a shocking pink cover that bore the inscription BABY DOLL LOUNGE. This little artifact was something else Semple tucked away in her memory for future consideration.

She took a grateful drag on the cigarette and looked around the tent. “You live pretty well here.”

Moses eased himself up on one elbow and surveyed the tent and its contents and furnishings with a look of smug proprietary pride. “Believe me, it’s not all gravy being a prophet of the Lord. I figure I deserve a few home comforts.”

“Doesn’t that cause a problem with the flock? Don’t they ever come in here and start to wonder what’s wrong with this picture? You’ve got more than enough creature comforts stacked up in here to start a major mutiny among even those lamebrains.”

Moses laughed. “They don’t come in here.”

Semple looked at him in surprise. “They don’t come in here.”

“They all think I keep the Ark of the Covenant in here and they’ll go blind if they so much as peek inside.”

“So you’ve got them snowed.”

Moses winked. “In drifts up to their dirty necks. When they have to pack the shit to carry it, I insist they keep their eyes tightly closed.”

Semple again peered around the tent. “And do you have the Ark of the Covenant in here?”

“I used to. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a freakout at the last Golden Calf orgy and the Ten Commandments got broken.”

“What happened?”

“That drunken tubercular son of a bitch Doc Holliday took a shot at me. I’m lucky he didn’t nail me; he used a gold bullet and the Gun That Belonged to Elvis, and he could have done me some real damage.”

“So what did you do?”

“I let loose the plasma on them. Probably blasted the pair of them all the way back to the Great Double Helix.”

“The pair of them? Who’s the other one?”

Moses scowled. “Holliday and that Morrison.”

Synchronicity booted Semple hard. “Morrison?”

“Jim Morrison, that drunk singer from the sixties. Why do you ask?”

Semple covered her surprise as best she could. “No reason. The name just came up recently.”

“Of course, this asshole probably wasn’t the original Jim Morrison, the real Morrison. There’s plenty of them running around pretending to be Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, or Jerry Garcia, trying to pick up women.”

Moses’ hand was now cupping her breast, and she could feel a second-time excitement building in him. She would have liked to point out that he wasn’t doing so badly in the celeb impersonation department himself, but she restrained herself. Arch observations at this stage might place too much of a strain on her already pretty threadbare luck. Moses was now licking her ear. The first time had been fun, a relief after all the tension that had gone before. She was reluctant to humor him a second time, but she knew she’d have to go along. She slid a hand down to his already stiffening cock and began to stroke it gently. Maybe she could excuse herself with just some creative masturbation. She put her mouth close to his ear. “It feels like you haven’t done this for a while.”

“It’s been some time.”

“The tribe doesn’t have the odd good-looking Daisy Mae among its number that you can bring in here for your amusement? You ever think of blindfolding them, so they supposedly couldn’t see the Ark?”

Moses rapidly stiffened under her hands and his words were punctuated by short gasps of pleasure. “That’s what I used to do, but afterwards they had to go. I couldn’t have them talking to the others.”

Semple’s hand halted in midcaress. What the hell did that mean? He “couldn’t have them talking to the others”? Was he implying that . . . ? The thought made a sickening kind of sense: patriarch doubling as pseudo, netherworld serial killer.

Moses sounded aggrieved. “Why did you stop? I was enjoying that.”

This time Semple didn’t hold back. She said exactly what was on her mind. If she was going to the Great Double Helix, it might be the best thing. In this incarnation, she seemed to be cursed to encounter nothing but barbarous psychopaths. “Will you be getting rid of me once you’re done with me?”

***

“A submarine boat. I guess it couldn’t have been anything else.”

Jim half smiled at Doc’s antiquated turn of phrase. “In our time we just called them submarines, or even subs.”

Doc shrugged. “So I’m stuck in Jules Verne. The fact remains, it must have been something of the kind that took out those things on Jet Skis.”

Jim frowned. He had slowed the launch to a cruising speed once the danger of pursuit had passed, and now he stared thoughtfully at the debris and smoke still visible astern. “If it was a submarine that took out those things chasing us, it must have been blockading Gehenna.”

Doc didn’t seem to buy this idea. “Why in hell should anyone be blockading Gehenna?”

“How should I know? That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t make any sense. The only other alternative is that someone down there likes us and is cruising around under the surface to make absolutely sure we get where we’re going. And since I don’t have a clear idea myself where we’re going and I can’t remember having any friends, lovers, or benefactors who own submarines, I find myself left at something of a loss. You know what I’m saying? This is one of those conundrums that can invite a mess o’ speculation.”

Doc picked up the bottle that had been set aside during the emergency. He seemed considerably less concerned than Jim. “The one thing I’ve learned during my long sojourn in these places is that speculation rarely yields a profit. Or a prophet, for that matter.”

Jim wasn’t sure what to make of Doc’s attitude. Either he’d been dead so long that possible futures didn’t worry him, or he knew something Jim didn’t know and wasn’t about to tell. “You’re not confused or disturbed?”

Doc hesitated for a few moments before answering. “I try never to get disturbed, but I will admit that I’ll be a whole lot happier when we make it up to the tunnel.”

***

Moses got up from the bed, went to the wet bar on the other side of the tent, and slowly prepared two rum and Cokes. He seemed amused at Semple’s concern. “Of course I won’t get rid of you. You’re not like those cretins outside. You’re not one of them. I can do what I like with those hicks. I mean, they belong to me. Either I made them or they came here from the pods of their own free will, and only remain on the understanding that they’re mine, body and soul, chattels to do with as I please. The difference between them and the sheep and goats is so marginal it hardly signifies. Sometimes I sacrifice a sheep and sometimes I sacrifice a young woman. Why do you have a problem with that?”

Even though the subject under discussion was her own immediate fate, Semple couldn’t help but be amused by the rum and Coke being poured into the two rapidly frosting sapphire-blue glasses. It was a detail so far from the Old Testament desert outside the tent that its absurdity was almost charming. She also couldn’t help but admire the magnificence of the body Moses had created for himself. Naked, the face was considerably enhanced by a muscular symmetry straight out of Michelangelo. “I’m still wondering if I’m going to be tomorrow’s sacrifice.”

Moses handed Semple her drink and continued his stream of self-justification. “And what’s so wrong with a human sacrifice? Didn’t God instruct Abraham to kill him a son?”

If Semple hadn’t been so aware of the potential jeopardy she could be in, she might almost have laughed at the prophetic gravity with which Moses spouted his nonsense. “Don’t bullshit me, Prophet of the Lord. The bit about ‘killing God a son’ is from Bob Dylan, not the Bible. And, anyway, God called off the sacrifice. It was only a loyalty test. Read Genesis 22. It takes up most of the chapter.”

“You know your Bible.”

Now Semple was starting to grow angry despite her fear. “Of course I know my fucking Bible. I’m one-half of Aimee Semple McPherson, aren’t I?”

Moses turned and treated her to a searching stare. “Back in this place where you and your sister dwell, you’ve never been tempted to abuse your creations?”

Semple thought of Aimee’s Place of Skulls and her own torture chambers. She didn’t want to admit the existence of either to Moses, but to deny it would be pure hypocrisy. She decided to avoid the question. “When it’s a woman you’ve just had sex with that you’re sacrificing, it seems a little too like the way of the praying mantis.”

Moses assumed a superior smile. “With the mantis, it’s the female who kills after sex.”

The smile irritated Semple. “Okay, so how about ritual serial killing? Isn’t there a touch of the Norman Bates about it?”

“I don’t keep my mother in the root cellar. And besides, I don’t think poor Norman ever had sex with any of his victims.”

“He still killed them.”

“But I’m not killing these girls. Get real. They’re all dead already, aren’t they? We’re all dead already. At worst, I’m just sending them back to the Great Double Helix, and in that I could well be doing them a favor. Maybe after another spell in the pods, their choice of reality might be a little more intelligent. Ignorance may be the choice of the stupid, but if the stupid are ever capable of learning anything, it must surely be that ignorance is a steep path to climb, with nothing to break the fall and deadly sharp rocks at the bottom.”

“Very poetic.”

“It’s expected of me. It goes with the gig.”

“It’s a gig I know well. My sister and I helped write the book on twentieth century evangelism. It’s a damn shame we didn’t live long enough to get on TV. Could have made a fortune. Maybe even opened an amusement park.”

“Tell me more about yourself and your sister.”

Despite Moses’ assurances that he wasn’t about to do away with her, Semple remained wary. “We were once one and now we are two. What else do you need to know?”

“I recall that you said something about going to Necropolis on an errand for your sister.”

Semple looked thoughtfully at Moses. Up to this point, she’d had him pretty much pegged in the same paranoid megalomaniac bracket as Anubis. Maybe she would have to revise her first impression. This one at least paid attention and remembered. “Necropolis was only the starting point. Unfortunately, I became enmeshed in the dubious practices of Anubis that culminated in the business with the atom bomb.”

“And now you’re enmeshed with me?”

Semple pulled a swath of silk sheet around her nakedness. “Is that how you see it?”

“I’m not sure how I see it until I know more about this mission you were on for your sister.”

Semple held her gaze steady. Was Moses starting to reveal why he was keeping her alive and being implausibly pleasant? What imaginable thing could he think he might gain from her and Aimee? “It was an errand, not a mission.”

“Mission or errand, you seem a little reluctant to tell me about it.”

“Only because it’s a family matter and I know my sister doesn’t like the world to know her business.”

“Even people in that world who might be able to render her a positive service?”

Now Moses was looking straight into Semple’s eyes. She wished she could look away, but she knew it would be tantamount to giving him the game. “You believe you could render my sister a service?” She moved slightly so the silk sheet was stretched tightly across her breasts. “My sister Aimee is not in the least like me, you know? I’m what you might call the worldly one.”

“I have it on good authority that your sister needs help with the expansion of her Heaven.”

“Good authority?”

“There have been rumors.”

Semple cursed inwardly. “Rumors are not always good authority.” It had to be those damned nuns of Aimee’s. Semple always knew they couldn’t be trusted. “And even if my sister did need help to expand her Heaven, do you seriously believe you’re in a position to offer such help?”

Moses looked smug. “Perhaps.”

“And what form might this help take?”

Moses gestured to the desert beyond the confines of the tent. “I have a following, and certain powers of creation.”

For Semple, the conversation was taking a decidedly strange turn, but she did not want Moses to suspect her confusion. When Aimee had first come to her with her request for a poet, Semple had actually thought of him, before dismissing him as a prospect. The stories she’d heard about this supposed Moses in the wilderness had made him sound a little too unstable. Now, with a more intimate knowledge of him, she knew for a fact that he was demented, but if using Aimee as a bargaining chip helped extricate her from her current predicament, her gain would have to be Aimee’s loss. It was at that moment that a thought hit her. She had been cudgeling her brains as to what Moses might want with Aimee, and then suddenly the answer had presented itself. Her eyes opened wide and she grinned knowingly, full into Moses’ face. “You want Aimee’s Heaven as a Promised Land, don’t you?”

Later, when she told the story, Semple would freely admit that one of the things she had liked about Moses was, when his objectives were spotted or revealed, he didn’t bother to try to smokescreen his way out. Moses had grinned right back at her. “And that’s why I’m keeping you alive. So you can tell me where to find it.”

And Semple had her bargaining chip. Only it came with a new set of problems. The first and most pressing of these was, it didn’t free her from Moses and his crew. In fact, it bound her more tightly to them. The second was that, if the truth were told, and she prayed it never would be, she didn’t have a clue, after all the twisting and turning that she had gone through, how to get back to where Aimee waited with her wretched nuns and her equally wretched bluebirds.

***

The sky was now nothing more than a jagged, distant band of gray-blue, framed by the impossibly tall black glass cliffs. In this new stretch of the Great River, any semblance of similarity to life and Earth had been totally abandoned. The cliffs gleamed with a sinister sheen from the torrents and waterfalls that cascaded down them, and the razor edges on their acute, irregular angles looked sharp enough to cut a man’s flesh from his bones. The water the launch now traversed was a deep purple, whipped to a lighter magenta foam by the headlong speed of the current. Scattered flakes of burgundy snow swirled in a spiraling conflict of breezes, even though the chill in the air was still above freezing. Jim had little chance to observe these new surroundings, however. He had to spend all his time fighting the wheel to stay on course and avoiding the outcrops of dagger-like glass shards that projected through the surface of the roiling torrent, and Jim didn’t like it. In fact, he’d so had it with this stretch of river that his dislike boiled to a head when he had to wrestle the launch around to avoid tearing out a portion of the vessel’s side on one of the of jutting glass spear points. “This is getting dangerous.”

Doc lolled in the stern, unworried and unconcerned. “Don’t sweat it, Jimbo. We’ll be okay.”

“Are you for real, or just blithely self-destructive?”

“I’m telling you, nothing’s going to happen to us.”

“Why do I have the feeling you know something that you’re not telling me?”

“Maybe because you’re paranoid?”

“Or maybe because you’re not telling me something.”

Doc straightened in his seat and his eyes glinted with a first hint of warning. “Do I detect a touch of rancor in your tone?”

Maybe Jim was getting a little too used to Doc, and he certainly spoke without weighing the consequences. “Damn right you do. I’m sick of traveling blind up this goddamned river. I want to know exactly where we’re heading. Why does the destination have to be a fucking secret?”

“Like I told you earlier, I’m not the fucking tour guide. We’ll be there soon enough and you can see for yourself.”

“And what’s this tunnel you mentioned?”

“Like I said, you’ll see for yourself.”

Jim’s fury boiled over. “Fuck you, Doc Holliday!”

Doc laughed. “You’ve got a lot of balls when you get mad, young Morrison. There aren’t many who’ve stood as close as you are to me, with me armed and them not, and uttered the words, ‘Fuck you, Doc Holiday.’ ”

Jim took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m the one that’s blindly self-destructive.”

“What exactly has come over you, sport?”

Jim waved an all-encompassing arm at the river and its black glass cliffs. “Just fucking look at it. The farther we go up river, the worse it gets. The jungle was okay, but then there were the sandstone cliffs and the downed B-52 and all the other junk, then Gehenna, and now this. So what comes next, Doc? I’m feeling distinctly without a paddle. What are we sailing into now? Man-eating sharks? Giant squid? Or do we just plunge over Niagara Falls?”

Doc regarded Jim from behind an expression of blank neutrality. “This stretch leads directly to the tunnel.”

“So that’s the next surprise.”

“You’ll see the tunnel mouth in about five minutes or so.”

Jim could not resist pouting. “All time being relative?”

“The tunnel mouth can be quite a sight if you’ve never seen it before.”

Jim’s lip curled. “In five minutes?”

“Give or take.”

In fact, what Jim saw, and in considerably less than five minutes, was a cluster of slender towers like spindly bones that rose higher even than the glass cliffs. Jim looked quickly back at Doc. “I thought you said we were coming to a tunnel.”

“The mouth of the tunnel is cited as one of the wonders of the underworld.”

“It looks more like a fucking cathedral.”

“A fucking cathedral? Perhaps not the most appropriate simile. The entrance to the tunnel does tend to overwhelm and intimidate, though. It’s always reminded me of Gaudi’s Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, only on a much grander scale-”

Jim interrupted him. He hadn’t asked for a lecture and suspected that Doc was trying to screw him into the ground with pompous overinformation. “When were you ever in Barcelona?”

“It was one of my few hauntings. I was taken there by a freshly deceased Spanish anarchist. It was during their Civil War. He wanted to show me the communists fighting the anarchists and how a revolution could mindlessly tear itself apart.”

Jim would have continued the conversation, but a sudden buffeting of waves forced him to turn his attention back to the launch’s helm. He very quickly saw, however, that Doc was absolutely right. As more of the strange and imposing structure that housed the mouth of the tunnel was visible, it became evident that the resemblance to a cathedral was mainly the effect of the towers; holy had been replaced by an organically mutant distortion more akin to the work of movie monster maker Kurt Geiger. In its twists and turns of pillar, buttress, and crenellation, the tunnel mouth was unlike anything that Jim had ever seen, save perhaps in his human nightmares. And even those merely reptilian environments of Freudian horror were humble in comparison. The architecture that now confronted him seemed to draw on all the phobias of the bicameral mind.

Soon the fine details began to be revealed. Within the grand sweep of the structure lurked carvings from every conceivable myth and demonology. Screaming Incan feathered serpents jostled Notre Dame gargoyles for pride of place. Thunderbirds and dragons rampantly intertwined with banshees and monsters of the northern deeps. Ghouls and vampires formed ranks with night stalkers of the African veldt, chupacabra, and Chinese saber-toothed lions. And in the center of it all was a massive multiple inscription. Huge characters, letterforms, ideographs, and hieroglyphics had been carved in an area of smooth polished glass the size of a tennis court. Like some vast Rosetta stone, the same inscription was repeated over and over in more than a hundred languages, from Armenian to Zulu, with Latin, Swahili, and Basque at various points in between. Jim knew enough Spanish for that translation to send chills into him, but it was only when he found the English version, engraved in an elegant Roman serif face, that his blood truly turned cold.

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER!

He turned to Doc with a scream. “You brought me here?”

“It’s hardly what you think it is.”

“You brought me here?”

“You’re operating under a serious misapprehension.”

“Did somebody pay you to do this, or was this your own whimsical idea?” Jim took his hands from the wheel. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not driving myself into your tunnel. If you want to play Charon the Shadow Boatman, you get up here and do it yourself.”

Jim let go of the helm, and the boat yawed out of control. Doc was on his feet, reaching for the wheel. “You have it all wrong, my friend. My only thought was, where better to raise figurative hell than in Hell itself?”

***

The movement of Moses and his tribe proved to be no simple affair. This walking asylum of the neo–Children of Israel proved to be not only more of a multitude than Semple had previously expected, but a multitude possessed of an all-but-intractable inertia. The men, women, and sheep who had responded so negatively to her arrival turned out to be only a small section of the whole. She had been so speedily whisked away to the air-conditioned tent of the Patriarch that she’d had no chance to observe the rest of this hapless and misguided army of faithful. When she was finally able to grok the dusty and disorganized fullness of what Moses had wrought for himself, she could only wonder once again why so many in the Afterlife felt compelled to do things on such a grand but logistically impossible scale.

As far as she could estimate, Moses’ ragged battalions numbered between two thousand and three thousand souls who might loosely be described as human, plus maybe three times that many sheep, goats, mules, asses, and camels. To get the humans packed up and on their feet was sufficient problem on its own, laden down as they were with goods, chattels, offspring, and the responsibility of motivating the livestock. Just as it seemed that one section of the tribe was ready to get under way and labor out into the desert, sheep would scatter or lose themselves, pots, water skins, or pieces of bedding would go missing, or a child would wander off and have to be located by its weeping mother. The packing of Moses’ tent and belongings proved to be a daunting task. It took seven men a full two hours to disassemble, crate, and load all the stuff the Patriarch considered vital to his comfort onto the backs of mules and some of the stronger men and women. The task was, of course, severely hampered by the fact that those actually breaking down the tent were required to keep their eyes tightly shut throughout and work by touch alone, lest they set eyes on the nonexistent Ark of the Covenant.

While the Children of Israel readied themselves to move out, Moses prowled the length and breadth of the confusion, bellowing, abusing, and berating in a voice so artificially amplified and enhanced that he sounded, for all the world, like Elvis Presley recording “Heartbreak Hotel” in the big RCA echo chamber. Despite Moses’ vocal force, Semple observed that he had little effect on the humans and actually frightened many of the animals into even worse panic and disorder. Whole flocks of sheep would scatter at his very approach, and the sound of his voice, for some bizarre reason, appeared to have a violently aphrodisiac effect on some of the camels. Moses only had to bellow within their earshot and certain male camels would commence furiously humping their nearest companion regardless of gender. Needless to say, these outbreaks of dromedarian passion played their own part in the slowdown of the proceedings.

While all around her stumbled, Semple simply waited, and for once in her life she was quite content to let it be that way. The longer it took for the tribe to get moving, the longer it would be before Moses figured out that her directions to Aimee’s Heaven were pure deceitful fiction. The deal they’d struck had been a simple one. She would show the way to Aimee’s Heaven; Moses would prevent the tribe, who were still quite convinced that she was some previously unseen variety of desert she-devil, from stoning her to death. Moses, however, didn’t seem to have too great a grasp of travel in the Afterlife. He clung to the erroneous belief that the geography of the hereafter was actual rather than deceptively symbolic, and if Semple ever did decide to take him back to Aimee, it would be a matter of using the brutish mass energy of the tribe to precipitate the two of them into a wind-walk mode, after which she would endeavor to find Heaven by pure homing instinct. Aside from providing the raw energy, the tribe had no part in any of it. Once she and Moses were gone, this gathering of benighted trailer trash would be left to fend for themselves and figure their own salvation. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, with whom she’d once spent a memorable night under the stars of a Tarzana orange grove, so long, it’s been lousy to know you. In the meantime, she’d let the Patriarch and his flock meander around the desert for a bit while she considered the situation and looked for an out. She hoped this time around the out would be less drastic than a nuclear explosion.

When Moses had demanded she tell him what course to set for the first leg of the supposed long march to the Promised Land, she had scanned the horizon for a while, finally selecting a broken-looking volcanic mountain. “There.”

Moses had squinted into the bright distance. “Where?”

“That mountain that looks like a cat on its back. Head directly for that. When we get there, I’ll give you another bearing.”

Moses had looked at her doubtfully, but camels were nearby and he kept his voice low. “Are you certain?”

Semple had put on an aggrieved face. “Of course I’m certain. It’s where I come from, isn’t it?”

“You know the consequences if you’re giving me a bum steer.”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Just reminding you.”

“Then please don’t. This isn’t easy and I don’t navigate well under pressure. Just head for that mountain.”

Semple may have pointed the way, but that still didn’t mean the tribe came any closer to getting itself on the move. After a further half hour, it was beginning to look to Semple as though the Children of Israel were never going to move at all. Then the vanguard, which consisted of some hundred or so black-faced sheep and an escort of swarthy herders, actually began to head slowly out of what had been the campsite and into the open desert. Walking point, in front of both men and beasts, was a gnarled old ram with china eyes and curling yellow misshapen horns. Semple wondered what he might have been in a previous life.

Ultimately the entire tribe was on the move. Semple had to admit that they did have a certain slow, unkempt grandeur; their sheer size seemed to consume the desert physically as they made their way across it. Lumpen and ignorant they might be, hag-ridden by superstition and further confused by the arbitrary and often contradictory teachings of Moses, she nevertheless had to concede that they had a determination that bordered on awesome. They toted their babies and lifted their bales; hauled their carts and shepherded their sheep; raised the desert dust with the slow, measuredly resigned slap of their sandals; all with a dull, unquestioning, and infinitely patient optimism that, someday, in some way, the Promised Land would arrive as promised, the milk and honey would flow, and all their trials, Lord, would finally be over. And all the time, relentlessly plodding, one hoof in front of the other, the ram with the malformed horns led them. It made Semple almost sad to know that their beliefs were so cruelly unfounded.

Semple had actually expected Moses himself to be leading the migration. At the very least, being up front kept one out of the worst of the dust. She was mildly surprised when it turned out that he took a position a dozen or more ranks from the front, in the very center of the column. It made a kind of military sense, giving him a considerable shield of cannon fodder should the column be attacked. What she couldn’t imagine was what or who might attack such a large mass of people in a desert that was apparently devoid of all other life.

After a while, however, Semple found that she had to start revising her ideas. Maybe the dry, blistering terrain of scrub, thorn, and dirty sand wasn’t as devoid as she had initially imagined. The first indication was a wrecked gas station. The place looked as though it had been ripped apart by one or more huge mechanical grapples, and very recently, too, if the freshness of the breaks in the wood was any guide. When she first spotted the fallen Exxon sign, the shattered pumps, the flattened and compacted Coke machine, Semple had looked quickly at Moses. She was about to say something, but from the look of him, leaning lightly on his staff and gazing straight ahead, she knew instinctively that for him the place didn’t exist. She turned to see if any of the others were aware of the destroyed facility, but their faces were as blank as ever and they, too, seemed completely oblivious to it. Semple was the only one seeing it; and she decided, until she could figure out what was going on, it was best to keep her mouth shut.

The next oddity proved to be a drive-in movie theater, long abandoned, slowly ground down by wind and sand. A lopsided marquee showed that its last presentation had been a double feature of Ocean’s Eleven and A Hole in the Head. A large hole had been punched in the center of the otherwise intact screen, as though something fantastic had not taken kindly to the work of Frank Sinatra. Once again, Moses and his people showed no sign of being aware of it, just as they didn’t, about a half hour later, see the overturned Packard sedan. The automobile lay on its side, bodywork ripped as though by some huge gouging tool, possibly the same entity that had totaled the gas station. Like the gas station, the destruction of the car looked to be a fairly recent event. Its paint was unblemished, the raw metal of its wounds still bright and uncorroded.

Semple plodded on, pondering this discrepancy in perception, even toying with a vague hope that she was leading them into some kind of reality shift in which she might vanish herself, never to see Moses or his wretched congregation again. Stranger things did occur in the netherworld and she sure as shit was due for some kind of break. It was just as she was allowing herself this faint hope of a paranormal escape window when the ram halted in its tracks.

The ram with the malformed horns stopped and stood looking around uneasily. The next moment the earth trembled with a set of measured, even shocks, about two seconds apart. The tribe stopped dead, a common fear falling on each and every one. The Children of Israel stood, eyes wide, not daring to speak. Babies and sheep alike quieted themselves. And then the air was split by a raucous, grating scream, distant but still deafening.

“Ggggaaaawwwwwwwurrrurr!”

A corresponding murmur of pure terror ran through the crowd. At first it was just a whisper, but it rapidly rose to a crescendo of panic. “The Beast! The Beast! The Beast is come! God save us, the Beast is come!”

Semple looked at Moses and saw, to her consternation, that he was as mortally afraid as the humblest goatherd.