Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (11 page)

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“I hadn’t even considered it.”

“You hadn’t?”

“No, I hadn’t.”

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

“What kind of effect?”

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

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

“I don’t know. It might.”

“But you’ll take that chance?”

“You want your poet, don’t you?”

“Yes, but . . . ”

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

“I know that.”

“Particularly if you have plans to replace God.”

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

“It’s true, though.”

“It’s blasphemous.”

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

“But it’s not true.”

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

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

“I suppose so.”

“And you intend to leave from here?”

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

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

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

Aimee nodded. “Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What the fuck?”

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

“What?”

“NO!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim nodded. “I was close myself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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