Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

Hell hath no road maps.

The mouth of the tunnel itself was sneeringly anthropomorphic, a vast misshapen maw like a twisted grin of sculpted triumph, with the half-lowered spikes of a giant steel portcullis substituting for jagged predator fangs. Jim, however, was too far gone. He sat slumped in the stern of the launch, drinking so hard and fast that the movement of the bottle to his mouth had taken on a steady rhythm. Not even the booze, though, could stop his mind from screaming. It was just his body that was in collapse. Had there been a moon, his brain would have upped and bayed at it. As it was, his simian mind gnawed at the wire of its cage, and its reptilian base consciousness tried desperately to recall the chameleon trick of changing color in the face of danger. Not withstanding everything that had been said, done, hallucinated, and imaged, he was finally going to Hell after all. The only thing that kept him from total whimpering surrender was a burning anger at the manner in which he’d come to this place. He’d been conned and deceived; worse than that, by a man he admired and had believed was becoming his friend.

Of course, while alive, he had resolutely disbelieved in the horror of the biblical Hell. Aside from being a stance that he couldn’t credibly take, it had always seemed too cruelly and logistically unsound. What possible purpose was there in torturing sinners for their minor human imperfections, their petty foibles and failures? The Hell of the fundamentalists seemed so irrationally all-consuming. Why was the kid who masturbated to his old man’s back issues of Playboy plunged into the same lake of burning lava as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or Vlad Tepes? And if one was to experience anything for a period as vast as eternity, surely one would eventually adapt? The lake of fire could hardly remain a punishment. After the initial shock, wouldn’t the nerve endings burn out and turn it into nothing more than an environment, and a pretty ridiculous environment at that? Jim’s philosophy toward Hell had been one part Descartes; one part Lost in Space. It didn’t compute, therefore it couldn’t be.

In common, though, with everyone else who had lived through the spiritual battering of a basic Judeo-Christian upbringing, the tiny voice from the unassailable infant compartment in his consciousness would remind him, whenever it got the chance, that Hell was real and Jim Morrison was damned to go there. Jim had thought that voice had been stilled forever after the night in Paris, in the old-fashioned bathtub with the claw-and-ball feet, in the slowly cooling water with the three grams of China white running chaotic and deadly wild in his bloodstream and the disposable syringe lying where he dropped it on the blue and white mosaic tile floor. Even amid the garbage dump that now passed for his memory, the first thought, when he’d discovered himself on the other side of the overdose, in a pod in the Great Double Helix, still remained bright, clear, and intact. The priest, Popes, prophets, and conservative politicians had got it all wrong. The Afterlife was a million times more psychedelically complex than the imaginings of Saint John the Divine. He’d been right and they’d been wrong. You could not petition the Lord with prayer. And yet, as he approached the gates of Hell, the voice was back and shrieking like a toddler deprived of its Ritalin:

“Told you so! Told you so!”

It had all seemed so clean and clear, so much more as it ought to be. Admittedly, he hadn’t up to this point, done anything too productive in the netherworld. His only excuse was that he had felt the right to a vacation after the shit he’d been through in the last few years of his life. Too many people had seemed bent on laying the hopes, fears, and psychoses of the 1960s squarely on his shoulders. Up until Charlie Manson and his riot girls had happened along, hadn’t he been the dark side personified? Sure, after he’d died, he’d ambled and rambled, fought with the hopeless Dionysians, and generally gone on drinking and carousing and losing his memory, maybe more than once, for all he knew. Was he supposed to have been scoring points of some kind instead of frittering away his time? Or was all that had happened since his death merely a sadistic prologue, a vicious lull before the full-blown shitstorm of God-fear could crash back on him as it apparently had when he read that legendary inscription. LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE! Now the small voice had grown so large it drowned out all other thoughts. Doc Holliday, Long Time Robert Moore, and all the others who had eased him down the path to perdition were nothing but a conspiracy of illusions. Abandon all hope, Jim Morrison, you’re en route to the unthinkable.

“Told you so! Told you so!”

The tide that was physically floating him to the unthinkable ran fast and straight, between arching walls of masonry like a set for The Phantom of the Opera. Had Jim not been so far gone, he might have noticed how his entering the Domain of the Damned through a replica of the Parisian sewer system wasn’t without a certain irony. For some reason, presumably to make turning back much more difficult, the River Styx had reversed its direction and was now flowing headlong to whatever awaited. Doc had even turned off the launch’s motor, allowing it to run free with the rapid current. The air in the tunnel smelled musty and ancient, almost like a tomb. He also thought he heard echoes of mass moaning, but it was too indistinct for a certain identification. When he thought he saw lights up ahead, he quickly looked to see how much whiskey remained in the bottle. A bare two inches. “Might as well meet the devil as drunk as a skunk.”

Jim attempted to finish what was left in one fell gulp, but managed only to choke on it. “Shit, can’t I do anything right.”

Doc, standing at the wheel, glanced around. “You know something?”

Jim angrily shook his head. “I’m definitely not talking to you.”

“Still believe I’m luring you into the pit of Hades?”

“Aren’t you?”

Doc coughed wetly and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Jim’s lip curled. “You’re not the tour guide and I’m going to have to see for myself?”

Doc’s expression turned bleak. “I’ll have you know, sir, you’re starting to try my patience.”

Jim hefted the bottle angrily. “You want to know how I feel right now?”

“You’d like to eat my children if I had any?”

“You’ve fucking got it.”

“In about two and half minutes, you’ll be begging my forgiveness.”

Up ahead, the light at the end of the tunnel was growing increasingly bright. Jim glanced at it, and then back at Doc. “You think so?”

Doc adjusted the wheel so the launch didn’t run into the green, algae-slick wall of the tunnel. “I know so.”

“You’re pretty fucking sure of yourself.”

Doc’s voice graveled out. “That’s why I’m the doctor.”

Jim had no answer to this. Doc thoughtfully scratched the back of his neck. “You remind me a lot of my old running buddy, Louie Celine.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Except you don’t appear to be the fascist type.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Of course, his long day’s journey ended with the night. You want to keep the party going well past dawn. To the end of the night, so to speak.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t think there’s time for an explanation.”

And indeed there wasn’t. Within moments, the launch slipped out of the tunnel into something that was not quite daylight, but Jim would have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the difference. Certainly the spectacle that presented itself was nothing like Jim had imagined. It had none of the trappings he’d visualized in his tunnel fugue of funk and fear. No burning lakes of crimson fire, no tortured souls, no horned demons. He had entered the tunnel expecting Gehenna to the fourteenth power and now he was leaving it with Doc laughing at him. “Here it is, boy, although what it really is we can never be too sure. Some say it is and some say it isn’t.”

“You’re telling me this is Hell?”

“That’s what the majority claim, although the majority, of course, have a vested interest in the tourist trade. Me, I never like to commit myself. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the place was fabricated.”

What the launch was now cruising into looked for all the world like a small port, possibly in the eastern Mediterranean, around the romantic end of the fifteenth century, the time of merchant princes and pirate kings. The light was a little weird, admittedly, coming as it did in great blue-tinged curtains of luminance through a series of fissures in a basalt ceiling too high and cloud-shrouded for clear observation. This one concession to the subterranean situation, however, didn’t seem to deter the large numbers of apparently untortured folk who made the docking area a bustling place of commerce and transit.

Although Jim and Doc had encountered no other boats in the tunnel, traffic in and around the port was intense. A large number of small craft, from every conceivable period, were moored at the wooden jetties and stone piers. Taxi boats like Venetian funeral gondolas, with tasseled black canopies of watered silk and top-heavy superstructures of ebony inlaid with jet, were poled in and around the stationary craft by caped gondoliers, while a magnificent Mississippi-style paddle-wheel riverboat was majestically emerging from a tunnel similar to the one the launch had just left.

“Not exactly what you’d expected, huh?”

Jim ruefully shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“Wondering how to start begging my forgiveness?”

“I thought . . . ”

“I never believed someone like you would revert so easily.”

“When I read that damned inscription, I . . . ”

“But now you’re sorry?”

Jim nodded ruefully. “I should have waited and seen.”

“But conditioning goes deep?”

“I really am sorry.”

“But you just find it hard to say?”

“I usually try to avoid being put in that position.”

Doc suddenly laughed. “Don’t worry about it, my boy. I’m through rubbing your nose in it. I’ve never like admitting I was wrong, myself. In fact, back when, truth be told, I shot the odd man rather than admit being in error.”

“I’m glad you didn’t shoot me.”

Doc looked at Jim in silence for a long moment. “Do you know how close you came?”

“I think so.”

“Remember that in the future.”

Doc guided the launch into a vacant mooring at one of the granite block piers. He deftly threaded a painter through an iron ring and tied it off, then he turned and looked at Jim. “So? Are we going to Hell? Shall we see what the town has to offer?”

Jim looked up at the waterfront beyond the jetty, crowded with people in transit. “Are we just going to abandon the launch?”

“You looking to go back down the river anytime soon?”

Jim shook his head. “I think I’m done with the river for the time being.”

Doc picked up his filthy duster coat, but then let it drop again as though it were too far gone to be worth bothering with. “So leave the boat. Someone else will make use of it. Easy come, easy go.”

As they climbed the stone steps up to the wharf, Jim wondered what Doc meant by the last remark, but it didn’t seem the time to ask. As soon as they reached the top of the steps, they became part of the crowd and were quickly carried along with it. None of those arriving in Hell looked particularly worried about it and those leaving didn’t appear at all desperate, so Jim, in that moment, decided to put the last of his fears behind him, as well as any curiosity about the origins of the launch and, like Doc had said, see what the town had to offer.

To say that the mob that thronged the waterfront was eclectic could be considered a magnificent understatement. They came in all shapes and sizes, ages and dispositions, from all eras and cultures, and of every sex, multiples and none. A few could not even be specifically termed human. Three Aztec jaguar gods wrangled in an unrecognizable language that seemed to consist of grunts and trilling whistles with a pair of leather creatures similar to those that Jim had seen in Gehenna. Jim looked a little askance at the leather things, wondering at their hellish function. Gehenna had given him a fairly accurate grasp of what their sense of fun was likely to be. A suspension bridge troll and a crusader in full, if rusted, chain-mail armor, having carelessly shouldered each other in the press, halted to curse and abuse each other, and looked likely to fall to fighting. More general and widespread curses were also aimed at a trio of lizard men from the Planet Mongo, so shitfaced drunk they needed to hold each other up, who repeatedly lurched into people while trailing a bile-colored stink of gin vomit and brimstone in their wake.

Once away from the water and the immediate vicinity of boats and piers, the majority of the two-way traffic was centered on a bank of descending escalators fashioned from copper, steel, and dark bronze that seemed to plunge to infinity, flanked by two huge carved angels of death with wings that extended to form the roof of the shaft. As far as Jim could see, these moving staircases were the only way in and out of the cavernous docking area. Jim assumed this was where Doc was heading, and so was surprised when Holliday veered off, going in the direction of a stone colonnade over to their left that housed a number of booths doing a brisk business, if the lines forming in front of them were any indication.

“First thing we have to do is get in line and sell our souls.”

Jim blinked. “Sell our souls? Who in Hell would want to buy our souls?”

Doc shrugged as though it were the most natural thing in the underworld. “It’s the way it works in this Hell. You make your mark and supposedly sell your soul and then they load you up with a bag of the local currency to spend on drink or drugs or women, or gamble away at the tables, or generally dispose of on whatever might be to your own particular taste and downfall.”

Jim’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “That’s all there is to it?”

“Soul-selling is the foundation of the local economy. You got to admit it’s no weirder than a lot of other monetary systems. Ask John Maynard Keynes.”

Jim made a “whatever” gesture and followed Doc to the nearest of the lines. “Still, there’s a slightly ominous ring to selling one’s soul.”

Doc looked back at Jim, starting to lose patience gain. “Shit, Morrison, will you once and for all put ‘ominous’ out of your vocabulary? You’re in Hell, sport. What else can they do to you? Send you to Peoria?”

When their turn finally came, a clerk in pince-nez, business suit, bow tie, and high starched collar, straight out of the counting rooms of Kafka’s castle, stood in the teller’s cage of a Victorian banking house, ready to supervise the transaction. He pushed two moist clay tablets, covered in sparrow-scratched cuneiform, in front of the two men. “Make your mark, we’ll bake them later.”

Jim look doubtfully at the wet surface of the clay. “Shouldn’t we read these things before we sign them? I’ve signed a lot of dumb contracts in my time and regretted it later.”

The clerk sniffed and looked at Jim over his half lenses. “You read ancient Sumerian, I suppose?”

“No.”

“So?”

Jim sighed, reached for the stylus, and made his mark. Once the mark was committed, the clerk hefted two large leather bags onto the counter and pushed one to Jim and the other to Doc. “Move along now, there’s others waiting.”

As soon as they were away from the clerk’s booth, Jim opened his bag and peered inside. At first it seemed as though the pouch were filled with large gold coins, like Mexican double eagles or Spanish doubloons. The moment Jim reached in to pull one out, though, he knew different. The coin was merely gold plastic. “We’ve been had. It’s just plastic.”

Doc wasn’t in the least worried. “They work just as well.”

“Hell ran out of gold?”

“Gold got too damned heavy to tote around.”

Jim had to admit there was a certain practicality to the idea. “I guess that makes sense.”

Doc was scanning the crowd. “The first thing we need is a Virgil.”

“A Virgil?”

“It was the poet Virgil who led Dante Alighieri through the levels and circles of Hell.”

Jim scowled. “Even I knew that.”

“So these days, now that torture has apparently given way to tourism, the tour guides all pretend they’re Virgil.”

Doc indicated a group of old men in soft gray robes waiting, scanning the faces of the crowd moving to the up escalators. “Virgils.”

“Why do we need a guide? I though you knew your way around Hell.”

Doc shook his head. “These days, Hell has a nasty habit of shifting its geography when you’re least expecting it. The Virgils are among the few who can keep track of all the twists and inversions, and certainly the only ones plying for hire. Indeed, it’s how they make their humble nut in the underworld. It’s good to have one, at least until you get to the general area where you want to be.”

“So folks work for a living in Hell?”

Doc laughed. “Did you imagine Hell would be anything but a sink of terminal capitalism and wage slavery?”

As he spoke, he beckoned to one of the old men. “Ho, Virgil, attend us if you’d be so kind.”

The Virgil bowed and hurried toward them. Doc fished in his pouch and pulled out two of the plastic coins. He formally returned the Virgil’s bow and held out the coins. “Onorate l’altissimo poeta. Honor the greatest poet.”

The Virgil took the coins and pocketed them. “The poet accepts the honor and will lead you where you may.”

Doc nodded. “Then, like Orpheus, shall we start by descending?”

They were about to move to the head of the escalators when a commotion near the water caused them to pause. A craft, seemingly unusual for even the entrance to Hell, had appeared in the boat basin and the crowd on the wharves was pressing forward to gawk. A massive baroque submarine had surfaced, right beside the Mississippi paddle boat. The black iron monster had a definitely nineteenth century air about it, despite the fact that, in the nineteenth century, submarines were little more than a fantasy. Its cast Birmingham platework was decorated to the extreme, sporting fanciful scallops, rolling cornices, bas relief dolphins, and Neptune with his trident as a figurehead. A line of steel spikes along its dorsal ridge were also ornate, but looked as if they could rip the bottom out of most surface craft. Jim quickly glanced at Doc. “Could this be our benefactor from the river by Gehenna?”

“I fear it might be.”

“You fear?”

Doc nodded. “That’s what I said.”

Jim studied the craft. “It looks like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.”

Doc shook his head. “That’s not Nemo.”

As Doc spoke, a hatch in the conning tower opened and no less than the Voodoo Mystere Guede Docteur Piqures-Dr. Hypodermic himself-climbed out with the angular movements of a spider in evening dress. Doc took Jim and the Virgil urgently by the arm. “I think it would be a very good idea if we got out of here as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible.”

***

“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”

Semple had been certain that the Beast, the one the whole damn tribe was screaming about, was at least going to be the Great Beast of Revelations, the mighty usher of the End Times, with the traditional seven heads, each with ten horns, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion, as biblically advertised. Instead, the massive figure that loomed over the horizon was something out of a whole other cultural ethos. How in creation had the great green, mountain-sized superstar and post-atomic Japanese monster movie icon found his way to this place of barren biblical hokum? Perhaps it was merely that, when you’re green and the size of a mountain, you can pretty much go where you want. Maybe the phrase “post-atomic” should have given Semple something of a clue, but right at that moment the analytical part of Semple’s mind was in temporary shutdown and she stood, mouth open with an expression the British describe as gobsmacked.

“Godz . . . !”

“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”

The ground shook repeatedly as the King of the Monsters advanced ponderously toward the faux Children of Israel. At first, it had only been possible to see his head and shoulders above the line of the horizon, but the rest of him came rapidly into sight, his potbelly, foundation legs, and finally his mighty four-toed feet, each of the latter kicking a dust storm with every impacted step, but nothing in comparison with the billowing clouds raised by the angry sweeps of his impossibly massive tail.

“Boy, do you look mad.”

Semple didn’t figure how or why, but somehow she knew instinctively, by some third, fourth, or even fifth sight, that to utter the King of the Monsters’ name in English could not only cause him extreme and maybe litigious vexation, but also create other malevolent resonances all over the Afterlife. That was why she had cut off her instinctive utterance in midsyllable. He looked angry enough already, with his eyes burning red and his feathery dorsal wattles erect and quivering. Semple quickly racked her brains for the acceptable Japanese nomenclature. Gojiro?

Wasn’t that what they called him?

The Tribe of Moses weren’t worrying what the advancing monster was called. They seemed to know that he was bad news by any name and immediately scattered in every direction, running for their lives. Men ran and women ran, sheep and goats stampeded, and camels made themselves scarce at a galloping thirty to forty knots. Only Semple remained where she was. Although Semple was far from sure if she was simply stunned or other more perverse forces were at work, her refusal to move made about as much sense as everyone else’s flight. It is virtually impossible for a human, or even a camel, fleet-footed from fear, to outrun a being with a stride of five hundred yards. As if to demonstrate the point, within another three stomping paces one great foot had crashed down, flattening some twenty of the faithful and a few dozen livestock. A second seismic stomp crushed twice as many humans as well as assorted sheep and goats. Leaning slightly forward, the mighty Gojiro now brought his tail into play and, with a resounding slap, sent a good twenty percent of Moses’ remaining followers wind-winging their involuntary way to the Great Double Helix.

“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”

Semple had lost sight of Moses shortly after Gojiro had first appeared, and when she looked around she could see no sign of him. She was a little surprised that he had run with the rest. She imagined that he would have at least made a brief attempt to stand his ground and vibe down the living green mountain. The Patriarch had proved a chickenshit. This strip of stinking desert might be a tract of low-rent wilderness, but after all it was his very own self-created turf, wasn’t it? Unless, of course, she had been wrong all the way down the line. Now that she thought about it, she’d only been assuming. He’d never actually said how and why he and his people were there. For all she knew, Moses and his mob might be interlopers on the bad end of a netherworld reconstruct of Monster Island. As to why she was standing her own ground, Semple couldn’t quite say. She had no territorial imperative, and she certainly had no intention of vibing Gojiro down. Later, thinking back over her behavior, she could only remember a firm but irrational certainty that the megasaur intended her no harm.

Even in hindsight, this idea was hardly backed by the evidence. Gojiro clearly intended absolute harm to every human in the vicinity, and was bent on quite literally stamping them out. Even as Semple attempted to understand her lack of action, he was, to this very end, performing a quick flatfooted dance, a four-four combination with a hop-skip at the end and a whack with the tail on the off beat, and that was all anyone wrote for half of Moses’ followers. The accompanying earth tremors were Richter-scale-worthy. As the survivors became more widely scattered, Gojiro changed his tactics. He stopped dancing and began taking long, deliberate, hopscotch strides, like a child methodically killing a colony of ants. Every few steps he would pause to mop up small groups that had managed to elude his feet with a burst of incandescent electric-blue breath. Again Semple wondered what Moses and his crew could have done to so anger the King of the Monsters. If his movies were to be believed, he was rarely so vindictive with anything but high-tension power cables and Tokyo subway trains.

“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”

Except for a handful of the fleetest of foot, most of Moses’ tribe were now history. For all practical purposes, Semple stood alone. Gojiro had his back to her, busily uprooting a small clump of date palms in which one of the largest group of survivors had fruitlessly attempted to conceal itself. She seemed to be the only one in whom the Monster King had no apparent interest; could it be that some new reality distortion had come into being and he actually couldn’t see her? A swift blast of nuclear halitosis dispatched the last of the desperate fugitives among the ripped-up palms, and then Gojiro started to turn. He stared directly at where Semple was standing, and one look at the glint in his enormous red eyes collapsed her invisibility theory once and for all.

For almost ten seconds, the giant reptile did nothing but stand absolutely still and frown thoughtfully at her, furrowing his great scaly brow. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something and began to move toward her-but now his movements were completely different. He lumbered forward with all the care that something of his size could muster. He seemed to be taking great pains to not shake the earth or spook her in any other way. Not that he was very successful. As he came closer, the ground beneath her feet still bounced and vibrated so thoroughly that she was forced to spread her feet in a surfing pose to remain standing. At first it seemed as though the great reptile were going to reach down and scoop her up in one of its massive hands, like Fay Wray or Jessica Lange, depending on which version of King Kong one favored. Proportionally, Gojiro’s hands were rather dainty, particularly when compared to his behemoth feet, but each was still the size of a railroad flatcar, and the idea of being scooped into one of them held little or no appeal.

Gojiro leaned forward, but neither of his hands moved in her direction. Instead he just bent forward so his huge head was only twenty feet from the ground, close enough for her to smell the ozone tang of his lizard breath and hear the deep rumblings of his bodily functions. As his face came toward her, the monster snuffled slightly. Even his slight exhalation was more than enough to send a small dust cloud spiraling at Semple, forcing her to shield her eyes with her hands. “Holy shit, pal! Watch it, will you? You almost blinded me.”

Gojiro straightened up slightly and took a half step back. Although it was hard to read his expression, Semple could have sworn he looked regretful, even apologetic. The motion, however, was almost enough to send her stumbling. This time, though, she didn’t complain. The King of the Monsters seemed to be intrigued with her; he had neither stomped her to pulp nor vaporized her with his Roentgen breath, and she deemed it unwise to place any undue stress on her apparent good fortune. She contented herself with merely muttering under her breath, “Anubis and Moses were one thing, big boy, but if you expect me to fuck you, you’d better forget it.”

The monster lowered his head farther, peering closely at her. He closed one eye for a better look as though he had trouble focusing at what, for him, was such a short distance. Even a giant reptile looking at her in this way made Semple feel uncomfortably on display and she reflexively smoothed the folds of her rough caftan. “If I’d known you were going to stop by, I would have thrown on something a bit more presentable. Unfortunately, you find me somewhat lacking a wardrobe.”

The great red eye came closer. It had a vertical iris like the eye of a bird, and in it she could see her own distorted reflection. “I have to tell you, in some cultures, staring like that is considered highly ill-mannered. You’re Japanese. You ought to know about that kind of thing.”

No sooner had she spoken, however, than something bizarre began to happen to Semple. It felt as thought her essential soul-force were being drawn out of her body and pulled toward the huge red eye. Semple swallowed hard. “Oh my God, now what?”

***

Jim, Doc, and their hired Virgil rode down the endless escalator. Their final glimpse of the boat basin had been of Dr. Hypodermic stepping down from the hull of his submarine and walking across the surface of the water, leaving wisps of steam and blue crackles of energy while the crowds on the piers and jetties fearfully backed off to give him plenty of space. The Virgil noticed the way that both men had stared nervously at the black figure in the stovepipe hat and he’d looked at them with deferential curiosity. “You have a problem with the renowned Doctor H?”

Jim glanced sharply at the Virgil. “You know him?”

The Virgil made a slight bow. “Everyone in Hell knows Doctor H, but I’m glad to say that I’ve had no personal contact or involvement with him. I do know, though, that if he wants to find you, he will. And if that’s the case, although I’ve contracted to be your guide, I will immediately flee if Hypodermic so much as approaches either of you.”

Doc nodded. “I understand the limits of your loyalty, altissimo poeta.”

“You are a man of infinite grace and subtlety, Doc Holliday.”

“Thank you, altissimo poeta.”

Jim looked sideways at Doc. “Is it more likely to be you or me that Hypodermic seems to be shadowing?”

Doc looked hard at Jim. “I don’t know, my friend. What’s your best impression?”

“You seemed to be on pretty good terms with him back at that town of yours with the cantina and the opium den.”

“On good terms? With him? I never did hear of anyone exactly being on good terms with Dr. Hypodermic.”

“You went into the cantina without too much hesitation and talked to all three of them. I was the one that had to leave town.”

“All three of them?”

“All three of them. The awesome trio, the three voodoo Mysteres -Queen Danbhalah La Flambeau, Baron Tonnerre, and Dr. Hypodermic.”

The Virgil glanced uncomfortably at Jim and then turned to Doc. “Your young friend tosses these names around unwisely.”

Doc sighed. “Indeed he does, altissimo poeta, indeed he does. He’s one of those devil-may-care junko partners who won’t be told. You probably know the kind. If he wasn’t also paranoid, and occasionally halfway resourceful, he would have found himself consigned to some unimaginable place a long time ago.” He turned back to Jim. “It’s unfortunate that I have no recollection of this alleged meeting with the Mysteres .”

“That’s not to say it didn’t happen or that it isn’t going to happen.”

“Indeed it isn’t. I’m just saying I have no recollection.”

“It’s the only recollection I do have. I don’t remember ever seeing a Mystere before that.”

“But there’s a great deal you don’t remember. The dark Doctor H is the ruling spirit of narcotics and those addicted to them. You could well have had dealings with him and be quite incapable of remembering.”

Jim scowled. “Give me a break, Doc. You aren’t exactly a stranger to narcotics. Why do I have to take the rap for this one?”

Doc’s face took on one of his dangerously good-humored expressions. “Therein lies the conundrum, my boy. Either or both, or maybe neither and it’s all a coincidence. One way to find out would be to go our separate ways and see which one Dr. Hypodermic follows.”

“Is that what you want?”

Doc thought about this. “You’re kind of amusing to have around . . .”

Jim glanced back, but the escalator had been steadily descending its sloping shaft for some time and no clue was yielded as to what now might be happening in the dock area. About the only thing Jim could say for sure was that Dr. Hypodermic was not coming after them down the moving stairs. The Virgil looked impassively at Jim. “Doctor H has more ways of observing your movements than simply following you. But I imagine you’re probably aware of that.”

Jim shook his head. “No, I wasn’t.”

The Virgil gestured to the large, four-sheet advertising posters that lined the escalator shaft, held in place by ornate brass frames and protected by Plexiglas. Not only was Hell militantly capitalist, it was also inundated by advertising. Jim noticed for the first time that regularly placed graphic representations of Dr. Hypodermic lurked among the standard hard-sell images-the square-jawed cowboys and bikini babes, the nurturing moms and the adorable cuddly critters. Although the picture of the Mystere was the same in every case-a grinning death’s-head and a skeletal hand holding up a small dark green bottle with an ornate nineteenth century label-the banner slogan came in a selection of languages that ranged from Japanese to Hittite. Jim looked around for one in English and, when he found it, it was predictably oblique.

THE DOCTOR IS SO IN.

Jim turned to the Virgil. “Are you saying he can watch us via the damned posters?”

The Virgil nodded. “The Mysteres are very sophisticated in their uses of imagery.”

Jim shook his head. More shit in hell than dreamed of in your philosophy, Jim boy. He turned to Doc. “So, do you want us to split up or what? If you do, I’ll go back and get me a Virgil of my own.”

The Virgil quickly intervened. “That will not be necessary, young sir. I can easily summon one to come to us.”

Jim ignored the old man in the robe, staring intently at Doc. “Do you want us to split up?”

Doc half-smiled. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t. I feel better with you around, but if you’re afraid of some Voodoo god of dope fiends . . . ”

Doc’s voice was quiet. “Anyone in their right mind is afraid of Dr. Hypodermic. He can take you places you really don’t want to go.”

“So it’s a parting of the ways?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So what are you saying?”

Doc suddenly grinned. “I’m saying calm down, young Morrison. We stay partnered until the Mystere tips his hand.”

“And then?”

Doc’s grin widened. “And then, like the good Virgil, I’ll decide what’s best for Doc Holliday.”

Even though the elevator had seemed endless when they first boarded it, the bottom was now in sight.

***

As the vertical iris of Gojiro’s giant eye closed behind Semple with a moist butterfly whisper, the red light filling the King of the Monster’s head faded. She was now not only inside what she could only assume was the creature’s brain, but in a darkness that was more total than anything that she had previously experienced. Oddly, though, she was still completely unworried. She knew she should have been experiencing some combination of fear and fury, but the odd serenity that had been with her ever since the green beast had first appeared abided and endured. She was certain that the darkness was only a temporary condition, and in a minute or so, as far as she was able to estimate time, she was proved absolutely correct. A soft algal glow started to suffuse her vision, and she found that she was in a perfectly cubical room with soft padded walls covered by bottle-green leather or plastic. She didn’t want to look too closely lest she discover that the leather or plastic wasn’t leather or plastic, but some material far more disturbing.

By a stroke of what could only be pure Dada, a tall, free-standing mirror had been placed near the center of the cube’s floor. Semple decided it might be best if she took a look at what she had become now that she had apparently entered the brain of the beast. The first sight of her new self came as nothing short of a sharp shock. “What the hell’s been done to me? I’ve become a goddamned cartoon character.”

Not that her reaction was entirely negative. If she’d wanted to become a cartoon character, she could have done a lot worse. Her hair was a blue-black mane and her skin ivory white. Her figure was idealized and considerably slimmer and more curvaceous than it was in reality. Her legs seemed to go on forever, accentuated by the thigh-high scarlet platform boots on which she now found herself teetering. The costume was completed by a pair of highly revealing hot pants made from the same reflective plastic, a matching brassiere/breastplate, and a dark wraparound visor that hid her eyes. Her hair had been reinvented. It was still as black as it had ever been, but now it rose to a height of ten or twelve inches above her head and danced in place like the flames of some unholy fire. He face had been stylized to a simple elongated oval, with a pair of perfect velvet lips and a vestigial nose that was little more than a pair of cutesy nostrils. She had, however, acquired a beauty spot just below her right eye that she had never had before. She had also inherited a weapon of some kind: a baroque and highly phallic Flash Gordon blaster pistol in an equally baroque holster, strapped to her right thigh.

“And how long am I supposed play the part of some two-dimensional piece of animation?”

When there was no answer, she decided she might as well check out how the new body moved. Her first tentative step proved that she was more than merely two-dimensional. This body had a strange consistency somewhere between illusion and reality. As she twirled experimentally in front of the mirror, the motion reminded her of a computer simulation, of a flat drawing translated into a solid object by digital enhancement. For a while, the narcissistic study of her new corporate condition kept Semple fully occupied. On balance, she wasn’t too displeased with what had happened to her, although a certain feeling of incompleteness made her a little uneasy. She could no longer feel her heartbeat, or the blood coursing through her veins. She missed the tiny snaps, pulses, and unfoldings that made a human believe she was functioning. She might have been put out or even angry at this except that her emotional responses seemed to have undergone a similar reductive simplification, as though she’d been stuffed to the gills with anime Prozac. The old, fully fleshed Semple might have threatened her reflection in the mirror; the cartoon Semple just regarded it with mild puzzlement.

“The question has to be asked. What’s the purpose of this transformation? If I’m like this because I’m supposed to save the universe from a lot of cartoon monsters or something, I can’t say I’m too happy about it. This costume looks like it was designed for an audience and I’d really like a little early warning who that audience might be, and what they might want of me. In case anyone’s forgotten, I’m still supposed to be finding Aimee her damned creator-poet to help her get her Heaven together.”

And, as in any other well-regulated fantasy, the simple question only had to be asked to receive a response. A plain oak door with inset rectangular panels appeared in the soft wall. Semple walked toward it, hips swaying, attempting to master the motion of the platform boots. “I suppose I have once more to quest into the unknown?”

***

The lower end of the escalator ultimately unloaded its human and semi-human cargo out onto a wide circular concourse of blue light and moving figures, as though Grand Central Station had been converted into a vast ballroom discotheque. The only missing element was the music, and that was almost compensated for by the rhythmic throb of the huge engines that presumably powered the escalators. Even the beat of the engine, however, was enough to add a certain coordinated homogeneity to the movements of the mass of people who passed through and conducted their business there. The motif and predominant transaction of the concourse, over and above the simple logistics of getting to and from the escalators, seemed to be casual sexual encounter. For Jim, this made a certain sense. By simple law of averages, sex would be on the minds of a large percentage of those both leaving or entering Hell. Jim was well aware that, since the dawn of man, travel and sex had been indivisibly interconnected. Any new location offered new promises and possibilities; in Hell, this would logically go a few stages deeper. New arrivals like himself could carnally confirm that their worst fears were unjustified, and those about to leave could be tempted to one final fling before heading elsewhere. This was not to mention the ones who simply waxed lascivious from the boredom of schedules and connections. Looking around at the considerable numbers who purposefully cruised the concourse, Jim imagined that those who still clung to their illusions of transgression and retribution could take comfort that these determined sinners seemed doomed to repeat the carnal cause of their original fall.

Rent boys strolled by, flaunting every style of allure from Axl Rose to Lord Alfred Douglas, including a number who might have amused Caligula. The women spanned an even greater bandwidth of fetish and fascination made flesh. In togas and bikinis and Marlene Dietrich tuxedos and the harnesses of harlots of the Marquis de Sade, they prowled and pouted and vied for the attention of the carriage trade. Hips swayed, asses posed pert, long legs stepped high, breasts made themselves known, while mouths and hands spoke the universal languages of allure and come-on. Perfumes piqued appetites, cosmetics enhanced and enticed, and nudity reduced matters to essential basics. For those with more cultured and jaded tastes, lace partially concealed, silks whispered down the twilight places of memory, and polished leather and burnished chrome promised precise brutalities. Over and above the women and boys, the androgynes, the hermaphrodites, and the totally unidentifiable made their unique and peculiar pitches. Jim wondered and frankly stared at the circling parade with all the awe of a yokel. He was astonished that so much temptation could be crowded into just one geographical space, and at how all of it could be consummated by the hour in the hot-sheet hotels that ringed the concourse behind electric signs over darkly modest doorways.

“This is definitely what I’ve been missing.”

An Oriental woman in saffron latex and rhinestones with straight black hair that reached well below her waist smiled at him. A painted and powdered young man with blond curls like an epicene Harpo Marx eyed the crotch of Jim’s leathers and ran his tongue slowly over his upper lip. An older woman paused en route to the up escalators to give Jim an appraising inspection, as though she believed that he might be one of the ones available for sale. A mugwump vibrated its multiple udders at him and each one became tipped with a tiny telltale pearl of milky fluid. Belly dancers writhed, double-jointed mutations demonstrated lewd flexibilities, and a tall Valkyrie with a spiked copper brassiere, buckled-on broadsword, and a thick Teutonic accent whispered huskily to Jim as she passed, “Mine namen ist Zena and you look so good to me I’d fuck you twice for free.”

The words were delivered as a poorly scanned rhyming couplet; Jim was tempted to follow and investigate the reality of the offer. The Virgil must have overheard, though, and he shook his head at Jim. “It would be counterproductive to pause for pleasure at this early a juncture, young sir. I can assure you the offers that will come deeper in the labyrinth will be at the very least equal to any you’d find here.”

Jim was momentarily disappointed to be hurried past such a welter of delight, but he soon realized that the Virgil was only reiterating Smokey Robinson’s adage about the advisability of shopping around. He was aware that, even though Dr. Hypodermic might be on his trail, he was actually starting to feel good. He was back in the rough-and-tumble trade of imperfect humanity, and that in itself was starting to make him feel more human. He was also reaping the psychological benefit of being desired by something other than an alien simulation. It didn’t matter whether that desire was based on his good looks or his new bag of plastic gold. He hadn’t been desired since the Moses orgy, and at that ill-fated gathering desire had been a highly debased coinage. This was not to say that desire was any more pure and genuine in the concourse of Hell, but at least it wasn’t so mindlessly drugged, and it certainly made him feel once again a part of the great erotic dance of humanity. He straightened his shoulders, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and began to walk with a new spring in his slouch, letting himself be admired by any who cared to.

He turned to Doc to gloat about his newfound attitude, only to discover the gunfighter deep in conversation with the Virgil on how this present Hell had come to be, more taken by the old poet’s theorizing than the imperious beckoning of an importunate kitten-with-a-whip who had taken a shine to him.

“So you’re saying that Hell really succumbed to its own essential paradox?”

The Virgil glanced briefly at the sex kitten and then nodded. “If it was designed to be the ultimate in infinite horror and suffering, what was there left with which to threaten those already incarcerated within? It ultimately failed from the illogic of its dynamic.”

“So after ten thousand years they gave up and turned it into a tourist attraction, altissimo poeta?”

The Virgil smiled as if he considered Doc an apt pupil, though he may have just been looking to enlarge his tip by some applied flattery. “It’s certainly a very plausible way of looking at what has come to pass. Those of us who have made our homes here find that it’s better to regard Hell as an entity rather than a place. That which cannot adapt must surely perish.”

Jim caught on to the end of the discussion. “So Hell, just like everything else, is subject to entropy?”

As he spoke, Jim caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks. Even among the wide diversity of the women who thronged the concourse, this one was strange. Not human, but certainly not anything else. She was more like a comic book character, brought up from the printed page in gleaming scarlet and somehow rendered three-dimensional. To make matters even less believable, she seemed to be floating about a foot or so above the ground, oddly insubstantial, more like a hologram or a ghost than a solid form. This wasn’t the full extent of Jim’s shock, however. Though her face and figure had undergone considerable graphic alteration, he instantly recognized the image on whom the strange figure was based. He let out an amazed gasp. “Semple McPherson.”

As Jim gasped, Doc looked around. “What?”

And, in the moment that Doc turned, the figure vanished.

Jim was at a loss. “She was right here . . . ”

“Where?”

“She was right here, but now she’s gone.”

“I think you’d be well advised to get that lady off your mind, my boy. At least for the moment.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about her. She just appeared out of nowhere and then vanished again.”

The Virgil attempted to communicate his own lack of concern to Jim. “Many apparitions come and go in this place. They should be no cause for either concern or speculation. It is gone now and will not return.”

Jim’s face was set. “No disrespect, altissimo poeta. But I think I’ll be seeing this one again. Doc and I already had one sneak peek at the future and she was right there, in a starring role.”

***

Clearly the mind of the King of the Monsters was so underemployed that it could accommodate guests, strangers, even those who were some part of both. Apparently some had even gone so far as to set up their own virtual world in between the system tracks of the big beast’s consciousness. One thing Semple didn’t understand was why the vista in front of her looked as much like Japanese anime as she did. She knew Gojiro was an icon of the Setting Sun, but she wasn’t certain that was the full explanation. All she knew was that she had to venture into this new land, unless she intended to hide in Gojiro’s eye forever, and she could only hope she would learn more about it as she went. Her first step through the door and into this strange, hand-drawn world had been an unfortunate one. A glitch in reality of some kind had occurred in the instant that she crossed the threshold. She had briefly experienced a sudden falling sensation. A momentary chasm of open-air vertigo had yawned beneath her, causing a stomach-wrenching illusion of being in two worlds at once. Part of her was entering the cartoon world that lay beyond the door, but some other sector of her perception was in an echoing place of blue light and moving figures, a huge ballroom filled with insinuating whispers between the throbs of powerful machinery. For the nanosecond she existed in this blue world, a young man in black leather pants and a white shirt, with curly dark hair and intense eyes, had stared at her in amazement; in the same instant, she knew that he was the one from that strange erotic experience all that subjective time ago in the bed of Anubis.

When, by whatever means, the vision winked out, the portal closed, and the glimpse was terminated, Semple was more than a little disappointed. The blue ballroom had seemed considerably more lively and interesting than the environment that now confronted her, the young man more interesting still. She knew she could do nothing to recall the glimpse, though, and in a short time she began to doubt that it had ever happened. The new world awaited her and she knew that she had no choice but to leave through the doorway to the soft room and press on. The opening of the door had hardly presented her with any multitude of choices. In front of her, a seamless white bridge of an indeterminate cartoon material arched over an impossibly wide mountain gorge, the sides of which seemed to be composed of massive hexagonal rock crystals drawn in the same style as herself. The artist behind this creation must have been a painstaking obsessive, always combining three or maybe four interlocking concepts, layer imposed on layer, where one might have sufficed. Not content with the creation of the towering crystal mountains, he or she had then embarked on the monumental task of integrating them with a form of organic honeycomb architecture that infiltrated large expanses of translucent cliff face with structures that Semple could only think of as a futuristic pueblo.

At the bottom of the gorge, a foaming cartoon river rushed down to an unknown destination in a series of mist-shrouded cataracts. In the air above the plunging water, free-floating and irregular structures, complex motherships of metal and plastic, floated in defiance of gravity, huge projection video screens circling their undersides like giant TV billboards. On them, doll-like oriental models and slogans in Japanese characters promoted unguessable consumer products and unfathomable political philosophies. In order to see this world at any closer proximity, Semple had first to cross the bridge. The bridge was a single, elegantly arching span, plainly intended for a pedestrian like herself and yet without guardrails or balustrade, lacking protection of any kind. It appeared to be a challenge she had to take before she could go on. Normally Semple was less than enthusiastic about heights. On Earth she and Aimee had never been inclined to look down, and much of the fear had irrationally continued into their afterlives. Under different circumstances Semple would have thought long and hard about crossing such a bridge, and probably refused to do it, citing her unaccustomed platform boots as the reason. In what she was coming to think of as the cartoon haze in her mind, though, she hardly thought of the drop, wondering only if, should she fall, it would be strictly according to Isaac Newton at thirty-two feet per second squared or more in the survivable cartoon manner of Wile E. Coyote, who could always stagger away from the worst of falls.

As she stepped out onto the bridge with only the slightest wobble of her ankles, the Hokusai waves and decorative groves of cypress and pine looked to be more than a mile below her; and, in her animation tranquillity, she found that, by the time she was halfway across the span, the sheer quantity of naked air below her was becoming a trifle daunting. By the time she reached the far side of the span, it was with a definite sense of relief.

All the while she’d been crossing the bridge, Semple had somewhat naively assumed, although for no good or logical reason, that she was the only inhabitant of the place. Her half-formed and barely explored idea had been that this odd graphic world inside the brain of the King of the Monsters had been expressly created for her sole amusement. Thus she was taken somewhat by surprise when the three tiny women greeted her.

“Welcome, Semple McPherson. He awaits you in the dome.”

The little women were eighteen inches tall and totally identical. Their doll-geisha faces were exactly the same, as were their pinkand-blue-flowered kimonos. Semple could only think they had to be cousins to the tiny girls who sang to Mothra in the monster movies. “How did you know my name?”

“He told us to expect you and to give you directions.”

“He?”

“He knows everyone’s name. He even marks the fall of sparrows.”

That there appeared to be yet another all-powerful “he” in this place triggered alarms even in her dulled cartoon condition. “He told you to give me directions to where?”

The little women looked at her as though they were too polite to show just how obtuse they thought her. “To the dome, of course.”

“The dome?”

“Where he waits.”

“Of course.”

“You will go to the dome?”

“I don’t know. I mean, who the hell is he?”

“He said to tell you that you would know him when you saw him.”

The little women were so humorlessly earnest that Semple could only counter with sarcasm. “And that I’d love him when I knew him?”

“He said nothing to that effect. Just that you would know him.”

Semple was liking this less and less. “In other words, he told you not to tell me his name?”

“We only repeat what he tells us.”

Semple had already decided she didn’t really want to go to this dome. The fact that the mysterious “he” didn’t want to reveal his identity up front and the distinct suggestion that they may have met before hardened her resistance. “Actually, I don’t think so.”

The little women looked distressed and confused. “We beg your pardon?”

“I said I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll be going to your dome.”

The little women looked at her as though what she said was making absolutely no sense. “But you have to go to the dome. He desires it. Besides, there is really no other place to go.”

From the get-go Semple had suspected that she might have very little choice in the matter. “What you’re telling me is that it’s the dome or nothing?”

The little women smiled sweetly. “We would never do anything to infringe on your free will, but . . . ”

“But the answer is yes?”

The little women at least had the decency to cast their eyes downward. “Yes.”

“I’ve recently been through a couple of singularly unpleasant experiences.”

“We’re sorry.”

“So if this turns out to be another one, I promise I will come back and beat the three of you to miniature bloody pulp.”

The little women beamed. “We understand perfectly.”

Semple nodded grimly. “Okay, so are you going to point the way?”

“We’ll do better than that. We will take you there. Please follow us.”

Semple had wondered if, when they moved, the tiny girls would move in unison, and found it oddly satisfying when they did.

***

“Are you still thinking about that McPherson woman?”

Jim shook his head. “No, I was actually wondering where we might be going. Where the hell are we going, Doc?”

Doc pointed ahead, and Jim noticed for the first time a reflection of red and blue neon at the far end of the broad stone passageway down which they were walking.

“The altissimo poeta here is taking us to this joint I know where they just might make us welcome and I can find myself a poker game worthy of my talents.”

He hadn’t given the matter much thought, but Jim was a little surprised that Doc was headed for something as mundane as a card game. He had somehow thought the goal of his first entry into Hell would have had some more lofty objective. Doc, on the other hand, seemed convinced no loftier objective existed. “We’re in Hell, boy. What better and more challenging place to ply the noble trade? Did you think that, just because we’d become traveling companions, I was going to renounce my vocation? You’re starting to sound like a wife.”

The last thing Jim wanted was a confrontation with Doc, particularly over a matter that was so plainly dear to his heart. He quickly backed down. “I was only wondering what I was going to do. I’ve never had the single-mindedness to win at games of chance.”

Doc nodded as though acknowledging Jim’s retreat. “Don’t worry about it, my boy. Our goal is a place of many wonders and temptations. I’m confident you’ll find something to your liking.”

“You’re telling me I should wait and see?”

“At least this time you can be assured that the wait won’t be long.”

“There is just one point, though.”

Doc, who was walking ahead, looked back at Jim. “And what might that be?”

“Don’t you think a casino might be the first place that Dr. Hypodermic might look for the both of us?”

Doc’s eyes turned bleak. “If the Doctor is looking for both or either of us, sport, he already knows where we are and where we’re going. I thought the Virgil made that clear to you back at the elevators.”

Since leaving the elevator concourse, the Virgil had led them down a series of dark and winding medieval stairways into what appeared to be one of the older parts of Hell. Some of these tunnels were so ancient that hanging stalactites had overgrown much of the arching masonry of the roof. The walls were covered by such a thick patina of limestone that it concealed most of the bas relief carvings with which they were decorated, but since these were of human faces twisted into the distortions of unimaginable torment, Jim felt that time’s overlay was a distinct improvement. He looked questioningly at the Virgil. “So what was this place used for when Hell was really Hell, altissimo poeta?”

“It was the sector reserved for suicides.”

Jim laughed. “And they turned it into a casino?”

“It seems somehow appropriate, don’t you think?”

***

From the outside, the mysterious dome looked to have been constructed with more than a modicum of good taste. For Semple, this was at least an initial encouragement. She had followed the three tiny women away from the bridge and along a white stone path that curved between carefully manicured banks of flowering shrubs. After about a hundred paces, it crossed a small fast-flowing stream where rainbow trout and huge antique carp ran in the shallows, and kingfishers and dragonflies hovered in wait for their prey. Every detail seemed calculated to invoke a mood of harmony and peace, but Semple couldn’t help but wonder. Should she take everything at face value, or was she was being suckered into some kind of trap? Surprisingly, she found herself leaning to the former, something she put down to her new set of cartoon emotional responses and their constant drift to a state of naive wonderment. As she crossed the stream, she had to restrain herself from remarking how groovy it all was.

“What the hell is happening to me?”

The only jarring note was the box privet maze that had been planted at a distance from the path on the far bank of the stream. Something about it awoke the old mistrustful Semple. The leaves were too damned green, the interior too dark and forbidding, and she didn’t like the look of the hard-eyed gulls that circled the spiral of hedges, as though those who couldn’t find their way out might be left in there to die. Even this wasn’t enough, though, for her to build a full head of belligerent trepidation. She found herself blithely dismissing the maze. None of her concern. It was the dome she was going to, wasn’t it?

The dome itself was in no way threatening. It nestled, as unobtrusively as a seventy-foot brilliant white hemisphere could nestle, in a low depression between decorative outcroppings of yellow-veined rocks. To further ensure that it didn’t muscle out the rest of the landscape with its geometric perfection, it was partially hidden by exotic conifers, shaped on the large scale but with the elegant contortions of bonsai.

The three tiny women, in a single singsong voice, directed Semple’s attention to the path’s end at a low entranceway like a giant mail slot in the base of the dome. “You go in there.”

“You don’t come in with me?”

“We never enter the dome except when invited.”

“And this time you weren’t invited?”

“We were only instructed to meet you at the bridge.”

“And you only do as you’re instructed?”

“Of course.”

“Instructed by him?

“Who else?”

Semple nodded. “Right.” Even in her dumbed-down condition, she had the distinct feeling that she might be walking into another Anubian harem horror. Unfortunately, she lacked any other real alternative.

Now that she was closer, Semple could see that the wide, low entrance sported triple doors of cartoon black glass with dramatically drawn highlights. She left the three tiny women standing on the path and moved briskly toward the doors. She hardly expected them to be locked against her after he had gone to so much trouble to get her there, but she wouldn’t have been surprised at some kind of entry ritual, if only as a show of strength. To her mild surprise, the doors simply slid open at her approach as though controlled by some concealed sensor. She stepped through and immediately found herself in an airlock or antechamber, with a second set of doors preventing her from going any farther. As the outer doors closed behind her, bright ultraviolet light streamed down from overhead luminous panels. This took Semple somewhat by surprise. Was this supposed to be some kind of sterilization process? If it was, it didn’t augur well for her first meeting with him. To maintain a Howard Hughes phobia of germs after one’s death required an incredibly enduring paranoia.

Semple had no sooner reached this conclusion than something happened that forced her to radically revise her thinking. Her entire body started to rearrange itself under the UV light. The cartoon physicality began to morph and fill out, returning herself to her natural form. The sudden transformation wasn’t in any way painful, but it left her with a queasy, light-headed feeling, and rapidly fading double vision. The skin-tight comic book clothing proved less than comfortable, now that her human flesh was squeezed into it. Before she had any chance to take stock of this unexpected state, however, an inner door opened and she knew she was expected to go on through. She noted as she stepped through the door that the ray gun was still strapped to her thigh. She wasn’t sure if it would be of any practical use, but it had a comfortable heft to it; she wished she’d had something similar during her first encounters with Anubis and Moses. She also observed, glancing at her reflection in the glass of one sliding door, that she had retained the beauty spot from her cartoon face.

The great circular interior of the dome was so sparsely furnished that its occupier, the mysterious “he,” appeared to be doing little more than squatting in the manner of the most squalid of young single males. Half-unpacked boxes littered the floor, and the large leather couch, the apparent focal point of the space, was surrounded by drifts of papers, beer cans, and discarded Japanese food containers. Only one side was free of debris, and that was where a monolith of black electronic components squatted with LEDs blinking, flanked by a black refrigerator and a microwave oven. The couch looked directly at a large seventy-millimeter projection TV screen, some twelve feet across and letterbox in format, mounted above a powerful complex of speakers. The screen so dominated the space that it looked to Semple as though the entire dome must have been devised for snacking and TV watching. A movie was playing as Semple entered; Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Sophia Loren in The Pride and the Passion. The only other permanent feature, apart from the small sun-sphere that floated high in the apex, supplying an approximation of outdoor light, was a small cross-shaped swimming pool off to one side of the screen. A cross-shaped pool was a little weird by most standards, but by far the most startling object among the dome’s assorted contents was the goat, who stood amid a scattered pile of hay just inside the door to the UV chamber, contentedly chewing. Semple instantly recognized it as the gnarled old ram with china eyes and curling yellow misshapen horns who had led Moses’ tribe through the wilderness, and perhaps, since he was now here and seemingly at home, to Gojiro and their destruction.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

The goat looked up, but didn’t stop chewing. “I’ve taken up residence here, haven’t I?”

Semple had never heard the goat speak before and was surprised by its lilting Welsh accent. “I didn’t know you could speak.”

“I never spoke around Moses and his bunch. In fact, look you, the only time I said anything was when Moses took it into his head that I’d be a handsome item on the sacrificial altar, and then I had to put him straight. I never did approve of going willingly into that dark night, you know?”

Semple cut him off, suspecting that once he got started, he might go on chatting ad infinitum. “So Gojiro didn’t get you?”

The goat regarded her with its mismatched eyes. “Gojiro? No, he didn’t ‘get’ me, as you put it. The Big Green and I are chums.”

“So you’re the him the tiny women were talking about?”

The goat look surprised. “What on earth makes you think I’m him?”

“You’re the only one here.”

The goat nodded in the direction of the pool. “He’s there. It’s his meditation time.”

Semple found herself at something of a loss. “He’s in the pool?”

“Lying on the bottom, contemplating the infinite cosmos. You can take a look if you like. He won’t mind.”

Semple moved toward the pool. On the screen, hundreds of Spanish extras costumed for the Napoleonic Wars were hauling the huge siege cannon up a mountain while Sinatra and Grant watched with worried expressions. She reached the edge and peered down. A young man lay on the white-tiled bottom of the geometric pool, eyes closed, arms outstretched, mirroring the shape of the cross. He was white and handsome, with a soft blond beard that had never felt a razor. His long and equally blond hair waved slightly with the motion of the water. Semple glanced back at the goat. “This is him?”

“That’s him.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“Who knows what he knows?”

Semple tried tentatively to get his attention. “Excuse me, but the three tiny women told me I should-”

The goat interrupted. “There isn’t much point in talking to him when he’s like that.”

“How long does he stay like that?”

“It’s hard to say. Usually not that long. He has a lot of movies to watch.”

No sooner had the goat spoken than the figure in the pool opened its eyes and rose rapidly to the surface. Semple took a surprised step back. “Jesus Christ!”

His face broke the surface and he spoke. “You have it in one.”

Semple couldn’t bring herself to believe that this was the onetime Messiah. Although his eyes were deep-set and he did work them in a way that seemed to lend him a certain mystic significance, he lacked the aura she’d expect in anyone claiming to be God’s own offspring. For the moment, however, she thought it best to go along with the charade. “Does that mean I have to revise ‘he’ to ‘He’ with a capital ‘H’?”

The self-proclaimed Jesus was now treading water like any normal man. He might be able to lie on the bottom of the pool with his eyes closed, but it seemed as though he wasn’t much at walking on the surface. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and grinned at Semple. “That might be nice.”

He paddled to the edge of the pool and started to climb out. “You’re very good-looking for one of Moses’ bunch.”

Semple was outraged. “I am not one of ‘Moses’ bunch.’ I sincerely hope you don’t imagine I have any connection to that inbred trash except by force of circumstances.”

Jesus apparently failed to notice that he’d caused the least offense. “That’s where Gojiro found you, wasn’t it?”

“I was unwillingly passing through.”

Jesus was now out of the pool and standing naked in front of her without a trace of self-consciousness. “Passing through, huh? So why don’t you pass me a towel?”

As she stiffly handed him the towel, she noticed that this Jesus was a near-perfect physical specimen, but the same could have been said for Anubis or Moses, and Semple resolved to treat it as nothing more than a skin-deep phenomenon. Jesus paused in his vigorous toweling off and waved a hand in the direction of the couch. “Could you switch channels? I don’t think I can take much more of The Pride and the Passion.”

Semple was a little surprised. Not standing on formality was one thing, but this was offhand to the point of rudeness. “You mean me?”

The goat snorted. “He doesn’t mean me. You can’t work a remote with hooves.”

Semple was about to snap back at the goat with a crushing retort, but decided that maybe it was a little early in the game to be throwing her weight around. Instead, she went looking in the vast depths of the central couch for the remote. Sure enough, in one of its bottomless corners lay something black with color-coded buttons, only slightly smaller than a laptop computer. Semple decided this had to be the Remote of Jesus. She picked it up and glanced at the goat. “Which button do I push?”

The ram had moved from his pile of straw and was now grazing on a cardboard packing case. He spoke with his mouth full. “It doesn’t really matter. He’s almost completely unselective in his viewing.”

Semple hit a button at random, and The Pride and the Passion was replaced by a segment of Zombies of the Stratosphere in which a young Leonard Nimoy appeared as a zombie. As she adjusted the remote, Jesus flipped the towel over his shoulder and walked, still naked, to the fridge. “Brew?”

Semple shook her head. “Not right now.”

The goat looked up from his destruction of the packing case. “You could bring me one while you’re up.”

Jesus handed Semple a ring-pull can of Rattlesnake beer, chilled from the fridge, and Semple opened it and passed it to the goat. Jesus gestured in his direction. “You’ve met Mr. Thomas, I see.”

“I didn’t know that was his name.”

“He was once a famous poet, but after he drank himself to death, in a bar called the White Horse in Greenwich Village, he was so racked with guilt that he came to the Afterlife as a ram.” This Jesus seemed freely to indulge an oblivious and gratuitous petty cruelty that Semple hardly found becoming in even a wannabe Messiah. Mr. Thomas stopped lapping and stared balefully at Jesus. “I’ll have you know I enjoy being a goat. We goats can eat just about everything and we also get to fuck a great deal. As you well know.”

This last remark caused Semple to look covertly from Jesus to Mr. Thomas and back again. Were these two an item? And if they were, why had she been invited here? Before she could say anything, though, Jesus glanced at the screen and shook his head. It seemed that Zombies of the Stratosphere didn’t meet with his approval. “Try something else, would you?”

Semple hit another key on the huge remote. Zombies of the Stratosphere was replaced by Eva Bartok in The Gamma People. Jesus shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Semple tried again. What the fuck was going on here? She hadn’t come here to change the channels for him. The Gamma People were history. Now they had Journey to the Seventh Planet. Jesus didn’t seem to like this any better.

“No.”

Semple punched buttons, surfing a whole selection of drive-in fodder, while Jesus stood unselfconciously naked, beer in hand, staring critically at the screen. She whispered a low aside to the goat. “I though you said he was unselective.”

“Except when he’s just come up from the bottom of the pool.”

Next up, The Curse of the Doll People?

“No.”

A trailer for Invasion of the Star Creatures?

Jesus merely shuddered.

Atom Age Vampire?

“No.”

The Town That Feared Sundown?

“No.”

Track of the Moonbeast?

“No.”

Yog?

“No.”

Revenge of the Creature?

“No.”

Alien Contamination?

Jesus shook his head.

Flying Disc Men from Mars?

“No.”

At Death Race 2000, Jesus hesitated. For a moment he seemed tempted, but then he changed his mind. “Maybe not.”

Panther Girl of the Congo?

“Definitely not.”

“Listen-”

Jesus seemed unaware that Semple hardly shared his enthusiasm for locating the perfect ambient movie moment, and was oblivious to her growing irritation. “Try a different combination; we seem to be locked in some psychotronic sector.”

Semple held out the remote. “Why don’t you try? I’m clearly hopeless at this.”

Jesus took the remote. With a swift and skillful dexterity, he entered a long combination of keystrokes. The screen flashed and there was a grainy black and white Irving Klaw one-reeler of the great Betty Page, near-naked in stockings and shoes, with manacles on her wrists. What was unusual, and had Semple riveted, was that this particular one-reeler also had a man in the frame. In fact, Betty was on her knees giving him enthusiastic head, cupping his balls with her chained hands, while he reclined on a couch strangely like the one right there in the dome. Semple had been certain that Betty, whom she once met briefly in Florida, had never in her life done hardcore. It had to be a morphed simulation of some kind. Semple glanced quickly at Jesus. “If it was vintage porno you wanted . . . ” Then she stopped in midsentence. “Wait a minute.”

The camera had panned up to the ecstatic face of the man, and she instantly recognized him. It was that same long-haired young man again, the one who had featured in her orgasm vision with Anubis, and again during the strange brief flash while stepping into the anime world. Who the hell was he, and what did he want? She turned to see if she might get this or maybe some other answers out of Jesus, but she found that Jesus was gone. He was still nude, and still standing there as a physical entity, but his mind was somewhere up there on the screen with Betty and her mysterious paramour.

“What the fuck is going on here?”

Although it coincided with Semple’s question, Jesus’s gesture was in no way a reply. He made a slow pass with his right hand. The lights dimmed and the volume of the moaning, gasping audio rose. He started to move backward toward the couch, never once taking his eyes off the images on the screen. Semple’s irritation escalated to anger. “Can you hear a damned word I’m saying?”

Without looking away from the screen, Jesus sank into the couch, pulled his legs up, and slowly curled into a fetal positon. Then, as though motivated from deep within a dream, he began to masturbate. Semple was outraged. “This is getting absurd.”

A Welsh accent came from the other side of the room as Mr. Thomas looked up from the packing case he had all but demolished. “Did you know that goats discovered coffee?”

***

A white tuxedo and a clean dress shirt over his trademark leather jeans and boots, a black bow tie hanging unknotted around his neck, a scotch on the rocks in one hand, and a cigarette in the other; Jim felt ready for anything. He was cleaned, shaved, modestly cologned, and now leaned against the bar and surveyed the salon privee and decided that, maybe, with a couple more scotches inside him, he might actually be ready to face down Dr. Hypodermic and whatever that entity might have in store for him. When it came to gambling in Hell, Doc Holliday had to be given full credit for finding his way to the glittering diamond heart of the matter. The salon prieee was clearly an anthology of the best of every belle epoch in classic high rolling. A Sean Connery–era James Bond commanded the baccarat shoe and seemed to be winning with heroic consistency, while, facing him across the table, an overfed epicure in a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, who greatly resembled Orson Welles, chain-smoked Cuban Perfectos and looked exceedingly unhappy about the situation. As they’d entered the large, ornately furnished room, Doc had whispered discreetly to Jim, “That could well be Le Chiffre sitting over there. Or a ringer, who’ll do, for all practical purposes. I’d seriously advise against doing anything to ruffle or disoblige him. In fact, it would probably be a good idea if you didn’t even bring yourself to his attention.”

“Watch out for the carpet beater?”

“You’ve got the right idea.”

At another table, four Regency bucks played hazard. They were going heavy on the port and the claret and their brittle badinage was growing a little slurred, and Jim noticed that two of them were probably well on their way to taking it to the terrace. In contrast, the five Fu Manchu mandarins playing fan-tan at a nearby table did so in absolute silence, letting the click of the tiles do their talking for them, with a nuance of clack that could vary from smug to angry.

When Doc had pointed out the lights at the end of what Jim now thought of as the Sewer of Suicides, he had expected just a single casino, some kind of smoky western-movie gambling den with hunched degenerates losing the price of their souls to dealers in striped vests and eyeshades, while hostesses in fishnets hustled blow jobs and red-eye to the unshaven, whiskey-breath carriage trade. Jim quickly discovered he had set his sights mournfully low. Instead of a lone gambling joint, he found himself walking down an entire plaza of well-appointed casinos, fascias hewn from the living rock, much in the manner of the desert city of Petra, each with its own complex riot of animated neon. The lights he’d seen up ahead weren’t just from a single source but from a diffusion of many. What confronted Jim when the tunnel opened out was a complete subterranean strip: Vegas, Reno, or Monte Carlo consigned to the rocky bowels of the hereafter. In some respects it could almost be viewed as a refinement of a much older concept of Hell. Instead of lakes of fire and brimstone, souls could find themselves doomed to draw to an inside straight through all eternity, not unlike the sex-locked denizens of the elevator concourse. Not that Jim was thinking this way when the Sewer of Suicides first opened out onto this cavernous boulevard of honky-tonk angels, five-card stud, and broken dreams. He just looked around in surprise and bad-boy delight. “This is really fucking something.”

The Virgil had looked at him with a hint of reproach in his expression. “Did you really think I’d steer you to some funky clip joint, my young master?”

Jim had half expected Doc to go straight into the first establishment in line, which went by the name the Atomico and sported an elaborate nuclear explosion in garish red-orange and yellow as its electrical come-on. Jim had even started to move toward the entrance before Doc had shaken his head. “Not that one, my boy. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Isn’t one casino much like another?”

“To a drinker, maybe, but certainly not to a gambler. All this tourist mill has to offer is slots, Wayne Newton music, and seven-deck blackjack to discourage the counters. Not that anyone who goes in there is going to be able to count beyond the sum total of their fingers and toes.”

As if in practical confirmation of Doc’s summation of the Atomico, a squad of casino security, in silver radiation suit uniforms, forcibly ejected three sweating, Day-Glo-pink, very drunk pigmen. The pigmen, hominids but hairless, with snouts, curly tails, and perky little ears, existed in some numbers throughout the length and breadth of the Afterlife. No one really knew where the pigmen originated or for what purpose they had been designed, but some humans claimed that they were the leavings of an unholy Cold War genetic experiment. Others simply theorized that they were kept around to make everyone else look good.

Doc also declined to enter Glitter Gulch, the Alhambra, the Shalimar Sporting Club, the Four Aces, and the inevitable Flamingo and Golden Nugget. He was setting a course for the far end of the street, where a magnificent flight of steps led to what could only be Hell’s grand casino. So grand, in fact, that it didn’t even need to display its name. Where the others were purely gaudy, this last place made its point with dignity and fine architecture. Flames danced from cressets flanking the stairs, and the porticoed entrance was guarded by men dressed in the uniform of Napoleonic lancers. As they drew nearer, Doc nodded approvingly. “That’s the place we need, my friend. I’ve always found money flows cleaner and more smoothly in surroundings of quiet elegance than amid gaudy trash.”

Jim had looked down at his tattered shirt and general filth and then at Doc’s equally disheveled appearance. Although Doc had left his filthy duster coat in the launch, his boots were scuffed, his frock coat was dusty and stained, and neither of them had shaved in days. “They’re not going to let us in there like this, are they? We look like a couple of bums.”

Doc stared at Jim disappointedly. “Oh, ye of little faith, do you think there’s a gaming room anywhere that’s going to refuse admission to Doc Holliday?”

Jim shrugged. “Sure, they might let you in, but what about me? I don’t have any gambler’s rep.”

Doc sighed. “Have some trust, will you? You’re with me.”

And, as it turned out, being with Doc was all that it needed. Two of the Napoleonic lancers looked stonily askance at Doc and Jim as they first approached, but then Doc gave then a strange high sign with his index and pinky fingers raised and they seem perfectly content with that. The maitre d’ had raced up to the pair the very moment they set foot inside the door, and for an instant Jim had thought that they were going to be thrown out after all; but the maitre d’s only concern was to rectify their condition of grime and travel stain without delay. After receiving tips from both Doc and Jim, the Virgil had taken his leave of them, telling them he would be in the Virgil’s lounge if they needed him to go elsewhere. With that business attended to, the two travelers had been whisked into an elevator and taken to a lavishly appointed basement locker room with mirrors, marble showers, a half dozen highly attentive valets, and three barbers’ chairs with no waiting. Clean shirts had to be purchased, but a black satin frock coat for Doc and white tux for Jim came with the compliments of the house, as did cocktails on demand. At the end of the process, Jim had regarded himself in multiple mirrors and been highly satisfied with the result. As a final touch, he’d bought himself a pair of Ray•Ban Wayfarers at the casino gift shop. Prices in Hell seemed to be extraordinarily cheap.

They had been left to make their own entrance into the casino. Jim had been all ready to follow the curving, velvet-carpeted stairs down to the main room, where a guitar player who looked a lot like Long Time Robert Moore, only in a white suit and now supposedly blind, was playing blues with a trio whose sound was far too casino-genteel for Jim’s more raucous taste. Once again, though, Doc had steered him in a different direction. “Stick with me, my boy. The main room’s strictly for amateurs.”

Jim was tempted to remind Doc that he was an amateur, but decided to follow the flow. How many times did a man penetrate the salon privee of the best casino in Hell? The initial impression had been luxuriously pleasing. The cigar smoke was exclusive and harmonized with the most expensive of perfumes and that indefinable bouquet of seasoned money. Players sat with piles of plaques in front of them, some almost as large as dinner slates and plainly worth a fortune, while Van Goghs, Toulouse-Lautrecs, and Picassos looked down from the walls. On the lifeside it would have been called old money; here Jim thought of it as dead money. In his rock star days Jim had now and then found himself in similar places but always as an interloper or a sideshow. To enter as the companion of Doc Holliday, on the other hand, seemed to guarantee him instant acceptance.

Doc immediately handed over the bag containing the entire take from the sale of his soul for a croupier to convert into plaques and chips. Doc, it seemed, was going for broke. For the moment, meanwhile, Jim was left with precious little to do. In the salon privee, if you didn’t play, you could be little else but a silent spectator, and Jim had never found card games a spectator sport. The bar, whose booze certainly tasted top-shelf, filled his time for a while, and when its novelty wore off there were always the women to observe. One could never divorce money and sexual tension, and the women in the salon privee were of a unique standard of predatory beauty. Unfortunately, their attention was on the players, not any kibitzer in the twilight, no matter how romantically he might sip his scotch. One, however, did seem to be paying Jim a certain amount of attention. She had jet-black hair, cut in a severe geometric fringe low across her eyebrows, and was wearing a 1950s-style sheath dress in dark aquamarine. Jim didn’t recognize her, although she did in many ways remind him of . . . what was her name? The great underground lingerie and bondage model? Jim was certain he’d never seen the woman before, but the covert glances she kept slipping in his direction, which seemed to be a combination of desire and anxiety, were hardly the kind to be directed at a perfect stranger, no matter how perfect that stranger might be.

The reason the woman’s glances were so covert was immediately apparent. She was with a tall, narrow-shouldered, impeccably correct character in full white tie and tails, who went all the way to the wearing of white kid gloves to handle his cards. It took Jim no time at all to peg him as an aristocratic sadist from the old Heidelberg school, right down to the dueling scars on his cheek, the monocle screwed into his left eye, and the way his hair was shaved high above his ears. Heidelberg was losing badly at twenty-one and when he rose to resupply himself with chips, the woman quickly scribbled a note on a drink napkin with a slim silver pencil. She handed the napkin to a waiter and nodded in Jim’s direction. Sure enough, the waiter, without being too obvious about it, brought the note quickly to Jim. The handwriting was flamboyant and urgent, with the characters formed large and with decorative curves. The content, on the other hand, hardly made any sense at all, unless Jim’s memory was even more damaged than he had so far assumed.

My darling,

I beg you, for tonight, pretend that you don’t know me. The man that I am with would do terrible things to me if he discovered that we knew each other. It would be ten times worse if he should ever see that film! Even though, for my safety, we must act as strangers, don’t think I have forgotten that earthshaking night and all the awful and wonderful things you did with the DSVICE.!

Forever your slave and admirer,

Amber.

Jim read the note twice and then looked in this Amber’s direction. Heidelberg had now returned, and she studiously avoided his eyes. Either another time-shift was going down, or he was in a lot of trouble. How the fuck could he forget a night with that woman? and what the hell was the device? Since he obviously wasn’t about to go and risk Heidelberg’s wrath by speaking to her, he folded the note carefully in half and slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo.

It was only moments after doing this that he saw someone he actually did know and recognize. Through the door, maple-syrup shoulders above a second skin of emerald sequins, had come Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia (but you can call me Lola). She noted the presence of Doc, who was warming his poker skills before he went to the big show with four black-tie rubes, one of whom resembled the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated English king, and another the perfect likeness of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Having checked out Doc, Lola turned and headed straight to the bar. Although she was diametrically different from the Viva Zapata! bandita Jim had encountered in Doc’s forgotten town, it was definitely her.

Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to know or recognize him. He smiled a friendly greeting, but was met by a blank stare as she passed him to take the tequila sunrise that the bartender had started mixing the moment she’d walked into the room. Surprised, but putting it down to the same time problem that seemed to be affecting Doc, Jim broadened his smile. “We have met, but perhaps you don’t remember.”

This time, her response was an expression of unbreakable Andean ice. “We have never met.”

“Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia, but you can call me Lola?”

Lola took a deep breath and then lowered her voice. “I’m not supposed to speak to you.”

Jim was mystified. “What is this?”

“Doc doesn’t remember the last time we met and I’m not supposed to, either, but I like you, Jim Morrison, so I’ll take a chance on breaking the rules. I seriously advise you to get out of here as quickly as you can. Take your Virgil and go.”

“Out of the casino?”

“Out of Hell itself.”

***

Jesus’ free hand moved to the remote, apparently of its own accord. The Irving Klaw porn had ended without too much denouement and was suddenly replaced by Zorro’s Secret Legion, a Republic serial that, in its whip work and leather costumes, ran with a distinct S&M undertow that was probably lost on the ten-year-olds for whom it was intended. Or was it? This Jesus didn’t look like a tenyear-old, but he did tend to behave that way, and he was continuing to jerk himself off while staring unblinkingly at the screen. Semple looked from screen to couch and finally at Mr. Thomas, the goat. “What do you mean, goats invented coffee?”

Mr. Thomas finished munching on a piece of cardboard. “The way I heard it, sometime around the thirteenth century an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi noticed that his animals were getting high as kites on the red berries of a particular wild shrub. Being of an inquiring mind and curious disposition, this Kaldi tried the berries himself. When he, too, not only got high as a kite but also remained awake for fifty-seven hours straight, Kaldi knew he was on to something. Of course, being Islamic, Kaldi’s first thought was that the said berries would be a way to stay awake and remain at one’s religious devotions longer than would have been previously possible. After chewing the berries, he decided this was a bit too much of a jolt. Soon he hit on the idea of stewing the berries in boiling water and drinking the resulting liquid. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the red berries were wild coffee beans and-”

Semple rather rudely interrupted the anecdote. “Is everyone around here totally crazy?”

The goat looked at her both surprised and a little offended. “Not really. Not when you consider that we’re living in the brain of an entirely fictional, massively oversized Mesozoic dinosaur.”

“One’s jerking off to an old Zorro serial and the other’s telling me how coffee was invented?”

“Strictly speaking, we’re not even in the brain itself. We actually occupy a tumor on that brain.”

Semple was horrified. “A tumor?”

“What do you think this dome really is?”

“Is it malignant?”

“Not for us.”

“I meant for Gojiro.”

The goat tore off another piece of packing case and started munching. In that he seemed to need to talk with his mouth full, a conversation with Mr. Thomas was not unlike ones she’d had with Anubis. “That’s something of an academic point. The Big Green has one motherfucker of a post-nuclear metabolism and I’d imagine it’s going to take a good uninterrupted ten thousand years for a tumor to hurt him.”

Semple was still uneasy. “I’m not sure I want to be in a tumor.” “After a while, you don’t even think about it. What are you doing here, by the way?”

Semple blinked at the goat. “You’re asking me that?”

“You walked in here of your own accord.”

“I hardly knew what I was doing. I just followed the directions of the three tiny women.”

“You always do what tiny women tell you?”

“Only when I don’t have a better idea.”

“You came in like the mote in Godz’s eye, right?”

“As far as I can tell. But you know what happened. You were there when Moses’ tribe got stomped.”

The goat avoided her eyes. “I have a bit of a problem with that.”

Semple frowned. “Either you were there or you weren’t.”

“It’s one of those cat’s-cradle time problems. Some of the time I seem to have been the lead goat for Moses and his stinking followers, sometimes I’m the companion of someone who may or may not be Jesus Christ and who thinks I may or may not be the reincarnation of Dylan Thomas.”

Semple glanced at the still-masturbating Jesus. “Can’t he hear you? He might not like his Jesushood being questioned.”

Mr. Thomas shook his head. “He’s totally in the zone. TV has that effect on him.”

An unpleasant thought struck Semple. “I’m not here to entertain you, am I?

“Not specifically, but if you were to offer, I’d be most pleased to-”

Semple cut him off. “Let’s leave that for a while. My sex life has been far too complicated of late. I really don’t feel inclined to go interspecies right now. I couldn’t take on a goat no matter how glowing his possible literary antecedents.”

Mr. Thomas chewed cardboard, apparently considering the rejection. “That’s a pity. ‘After the first death, there is no more.’ ”

“It really isn’t anything personal. I’m very fond of Under Milk Wood.”

“That wasn’t from Under Milk Wood.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s from something else.”

“Oh.” Semple covered her gaffe by looking around the dome. “How about, ‘it was spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black . . . ’ ”

The goat was mollified. “That’s better.”

The episode of Zorro’s Secret Legion had concluded in a seeming sudden-death cliff-hanger. Jesus’ hand twitched and a new movie was on the screen, Audie Murphy in Bullet for a Badman, picking up the story midway through the action. “I’m starting to feel that maybe the best thing I could do would be to get out of here. The possibilities seem a little limited.”

The goat swallowed. “Unfortunately that may be difficult.”

Semple’s eyes narrowed. “What are you telling me?”

Mr. Thomas scratched himself with his left hind leg. “You came in animation mode, am I right?”

Semple answered cautiously, unsure of what was coming next. “Yes. That’s where I got this gun and the ridiculous costume.”

“But then, on the way in, you passed under the lights?”

“Right.”

“And you changed back to normal?”

“That’s right. I did. Apart from the beauty spot.”

“Then that’s it. You can’t go back out again. Not in human form. No humans in Toon Town.”

“What would happen to me if I did?”

“It’s hard to explain, but very nasty.”

“So how do I change back to a toon?”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

Mr. Thomas nodded in the direction of the prone and masturbating Jesus. “He’s forgotten how to do it.”

“Are you telling me I’m a prisoner of that bastard faux Jesus?”

“Does he really look like a captor?”

Semple touched the ray gun that was still strapped to her leg. “Maybe this might get his attention?”

“I really wouldn’t try firing that thing.”

“Why not?”

“There are two likely outcomes, look you. Either it wouldn’t work at all, or it would explode and blow your arm off.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

The goat looked a little sheepish. “You don’t, but I really wouldn’t recommend testing the point.”

Semple and Mr. Thomas seemed to have reached an impasse. Jesus eighty-sixed Audie Murphy and replaced him with Charlton Heston playing Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy. “He was very creative once. Before the TV got him.”

“Creative?”

“He built most of the stuff outside.”

“No kidding.” Suddenly Semple was thinking. An idea had arrived on the half shell.

The goat hadn’t noticed, however. “In fact, it was him who saw the potential of the Big Green’s brain in the first place. He even figured out how he could get inside here and make Godz do what he wanted him to do.”

Now two ideas were simmering side by side. “He can control Gojiro?”

“If someone could turn off the TV and get his attention.”

“So why don’t you turn off the TV and get his attention?”

“I already told you, didn’t I? My hooves can’t work the remote.”

***

Heads turned and even the fops stopped their banter. The Duke of Windsor folded his hand despite the fact he was holding three sevens and had yet to make the change. It wasn’t so much the man as the aura that entered with him. Jim could only imagine that Dracula might have a made a similar entrance. The tall man in the powder blue, narrow-lapel sharkskin suit, goatee beard, and porkpie hat looked nothing like the legendary count. In fact, he was an almost perfect double for Ike Turner; although Jim knew immediately that it wasn’t Ike-Jim had played ballrooms with Ike and Tina and, although Ike could be mean, even he didn’t spread the kind of malignancy, like a sulfurous miasma, that was rapidly filling the salon privee. Lola was now noticeably nervous. “Go. Get out of here and stop being an idiot. You’re completely out of your depth here.”

Jim stubbornly shook his head. “I’m not running. I’m sick of having no flicking control over my destiny.”

Lola looked at him in way that made Jim glad he was already dead. “It’s not just your destiny, you moron. You could blow it for the rest of us.

Jim was going to continue to protest, but the Ike Turner doppelganger turned his head in Jim’s direction. The scotch had yet to slow Jim to the point of not being fast enough to avoid the evil eyes, but even the close pass he experienced was enough to send a glacial chill through his nervous system. In the instant, he knew that Lola was right. He had no clue what was going down in the private salon, and he certainly had no place there. “Okay, I’m going. But how will I hook up with Doc again?”

Lola fluttered her hands as though willing him away. She just wanted him gone. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll find each other.”

Jim moved as unobtrusively to the door as he could and quietly slipped through it. Out on the main staircase, he glanced at the nearest Napoleonic guard. “Some weird look-alike show back in that gold mine.”

The guard nodded stiffly. “It’s that time of the night, sir. Can I call you your Virgil?”

Jim shook his head. “No, thank you. I think I can find my own way.”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

Jim hurried on down the stairs, only to find himself confronted by yet another bizarre spectacle. Sid Vicious was coming through the casino’s revolving doors, swaying slightly, with a woman in a wedding dress who wasn’t Nancy on his arm. Just to make the picture a tad more off kilter, Vicious was wearing an outfit virtually identical to Jim’s-white tux, leather jeans, and engineer boots-except that Sid was lacking a shirt, and his trademark padlock and chain dangled on his scarred and scrawny chest. He immediately spotted Jim and his face twisted into a somnambulent sneer. “The Doctor’s looking for you. And he’s got some wicked gear.”

“Holliday or Hypodermic?”

“Which one do you think, you fucking hippie?”

***

Semple knew that she was trying Mr. Thomas’s patience, but she didn’t care. An awesome payback and an end to her adventure were almost within her grasp. “When Godz gets going, it’s usually bad news for the nearest city. Am I right?”

Mr. Thomas wagged his wisp of a tail uncomfortably. “He eats it.”

Semple hesitated, trying not to look too eager, but wholly failing. “So what would it take to get the Big Green to eat the a city like, say . . . Necropolis?”

“You want to see Necropolis eaten?”

“Just a hypothetical question.”

Mr. Thomas didn’t believe her. “You’ve got your reasons to see him eat Necropolis.”

“You have a problem with that?”

Jesus was still prone on the couch, but at least he’d stopped masturbating. Seemingly the Sistine Chapel didn’t turn him on. Mr. Thomas shook his head. “No problem at all. I’ve seen TV from Necropolis. The place would seem infinitely suited as a snack for the Big Green.”

“So what would get him to head in that direction?”

“Not much at all, if they’ve got the makings of nuclear weapons there.”

“He likes nuclear weapons?”

“He loves nuclear weapons.”

“The ones Anubis has are pretty small and pretty dirty.”

“He likes the small and dirty best of all. It was a nasty, dirty little bomb that thawed him out of the Arctic ice, don’t forget.”

“So it’s just a question of getting him started?”

On the screen, Michelangelo was complaining to the Pope about how he hadn’t been paid, but apparently doing little for Jesus, who jumped to an episode of The Newlywed Game. Mr. Thomas paused before he answered. “Only Jesus can do that.”

Semple looked hard at the goat. “The TV has to be turned off.”

“I really wouldn’t advise doing that.”

“It would be for his own good.”

The goat looked at her knowingly, calling her bluff. “You’re not interested in his good. You just want to see Godz eat Necropolis.”

“Okay, I admit it.”

“Turning off the TV just like that might traumatize him.”

Semple treated Mr. Thomas to her hardest stare of authority. “Are you going to stop me?”

Mr. Thomas seemed undecided. “I’ve a handy pair of horns, don’t I?”

“You want to spend the rest of your days shut up in a tumor with a terminal couch potato?”

Mr. Thomas thought about this. “You do have a point there.”

“So you won’t stop me?”

“I’m still not happy about you shutting down the telly.”

Semple knew she had the goat cornered. “But you won’t try and stop me?”

“I suppose not.”

Semple walked to the couch and took the remote from Jesus’ close-to-lifeless hand.

***

Jim was about to step into the revolving door when a worried-looking man pushed in front of him, elbowing him out of the way. Such rudeness hardly seemed in keeping with the ambience of the grand casino, but Jim could only suppose that the individual had his reasons. It took about forty seconds for those reasons to become abundantly clear. As Jim disengaged from the doors, the man had already reached the bottom of the steps. He halted and let out a soul-wrenching sob. “I’ve lost it all. She’ll never forgive me.”

With these words, he pulled a small chrome-plated revolver from his jacket, pointed it at his right temple, and pulled the trigger. The gun went off and a spurt of gray-pink brains was propelled almost to the other side of the wide flight of steps. Two Napoleonic guards hurried forward as the man’s body shimmered and vanished, taking its corporal leave for the pods of the Great Double Helix. The squirt of brain remained, though, and one of the guards quickly called for a cleaner.

“Brilliant. Blew his brains out just like that. Never thought I’d get to see it.” Jim turned. Sid Vicious was standing behind him. The punk had apparently followed him back out of the casino just in time to catch the incident.

Jim shrugged. “I guess it goes with the territory. This was once the section of Hell reserved for suicides.”

“You believe all that fucking bollocks?”

“A man has to believe something.”

“That’s the trouble with you fucking hippies. Always looking for shit to believe in.” Vicious laughed nastily and gestured to Jim with his right hand. “ ‘Ere, Morrison, catch.”

He tossed a small silver ball to Jim, a sphere with a circumference little larger than a quarter. Without thinking, Jim caught it one-handed. The sphere immediately started to glow and sparkle, an electric shock ran up his right arm, and his surroundings began to glow and distort. He tried to drop the sphere, but it clung to the palm of his hand. The experience wasn’t at all unpleasant, except that Jim instinctively knew the sphere’s intention. He was caught. The sphere was going to absorb him and take him someplace, he didn’t know where or how. About the only thing he knew for sure was that Sid Vicious had only been a pawn in this game. He had merely delivered the snare. The identity of the real hunter was something he didn’t want to think about.