Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (34 page)

“Now I’m going to finish you, you stuck-up harem bitch.”

The first gray streaks of a false dawn were beginning to show in the eastern sky as Jim moved gratefully up onto dry land. His boots squelched water and more trickled down the inside of his leather jeans. He was soaked to the skin, but since the night was as oppressively warm and humid as Orlando in high summer, it hardly mattered. A clean crisp shirt would have been turned into a damp dishrag in a matter of minutes, even without repeated immersion in the swamp. He was just pleased to be able to walk without having to drag every second step from seven inches of suction. The trees that surrounded the old spooky mansion were directly in front of him, but before he could reach them he had to struggle through a fringe of undergrowth where the water met land. Primitive mangrove and a tangle of some kind of organic barbed wire—with wicked two-inch and toxic-looking thorns—represented the worst
and final obstacle. As he gingerly eased and squirmed his way through the flesh-threatening foliage, he rejoiced that he had never abandoned the Lizard King affectation of leather pants. He only regretted he didn’t have the matching jacket. Although his legs came through unscathed, the thorns ripped his shirt and drew blood from long scratches to his hands, arms, chest, and back.

When he’d finally battled his way through these defenses, he found that, once under the trees, he was walking on a soft carpet of shaggy moss, growing lush on the mulch of fallen leaves and pine needles. More signs of humanity presented themselves. Over to Jim’s right, the rusting remains of a huge automobile lay stranded without wheels like a beached whale, perhaps a Lincoln or a Pontiac or a Buick Rocket 88 that, in its heyday, must have been equal in magnificence to Long Time Bob Moore’s Caddy. Most of the hulk’s paneling was now nothing more than red, flaking rust, corroding away from the chassis, but here and there patches of faded pink paint were still visible. His first thought on seeing the remnants of a pink paint job was the mammal’s remark that Elvis might once have occupied the house. The immobile hunk had surely rested there for sixty or seventy years; a fairly substantial conifer had grown up through the interior, punched through the sunroof, and continued to grow for another forty or fifty feet. Logic suggested it was some long time since Elvis could have graced this sector of the Afterlife, except this Jurassic was in such a state of time flux that logic could not easily apply.

His main objective was still the dark bulk of the mansion, but Jim made a detour to take a closer look at the remains of the car. Even the outside chance of an afterglow Elvis presence wasn’t something one happened across too often. When he reached the dead two-door, he placed the flat of his hand on the pitted and discolored hood. Right then, worn out as he was, he could have used a strong jolt of Elvis magic, but the ruin of the car failed to deliver even the faintest residual slapback. More than a little disappointed, he turned his attention back to his primary target. One of the ground-floor lighted windows was on the side of the building directly facing him. An elaborate bay was surmounted by stone gargoyles with sculpted fangs and scales, holding up a heraldic relief, a coat of arms that bore the insignia of a key and an open hand with an eye in the palm. No detail seemed to have been spared in this homage to the intricate conventions of the Morticia Addams school of architecture.

Jim approached the lighted bay window with caution. He definitely wanted to see the inhabitants of the house before they saw him. He covered the last few yards to the house in a full crouch; then, with one hand on the carved stone of the sill, he slowly raised himself and looked inside. The spectacle that presented itself was hardly one of domestic tranquillity. The walls of the room were paneled in a dark walnut and hung with a half dozen paintings of grimly aristocratic men and women in flowing robes, posturing with dogs and falcons, against backgrounds of storm clouds and mountains. Aside from the paintings and the paneling, the room itself was dominated by a huge and magnificent fireplace, an edifice in black marble streaked by veins of yellow and green and with carved basilisks supporting a wide mantel. A log fire blazed in the grate, which might have invested the room with a modicum of hominess had it not been burning with bizarre blue-purple flames. Even more bizarre was the single figure standing motionless in the corner farthest from the fire. Jim couldn’t tell whether it was a man, woman, or even a lifelike replica, since it was covered from head to foot in a swarm of moving, jostling live bees.

Jim let out a low whistle. “What the hell do we have here? Jean Cocteau meets Edgar Allan Poe?”

As if his low whistle had triggered it, a door just within Jim’s field of vision opened and a woman came into the room. Jim instinctively ducked as the woman glanced in the direction of the window, even though he was convinced that, all other things being equal, she would be unable to see him lurking in the twilight beyond the light reflected in the window glass.

“Maybe Jean and Edgar meet Leopold Sacher-Masoch.”

Although she wore no furs, the woman was unarguably Venus. She was dressed—encased—in a cat suit of scarlet leather, pulled skin-tight to accentuate her decidedly statuesque figure by sets of lacings that ran from armpit to ankle on either side of her body. The ensemble was completed by a matching pair of platform spikes that elevated her height to well over six feet, long cocktail gloves with similar lacing, and a voluminous chiffon bridal veil in the same color. Her hair was jet-black with a bluish sheen, styled to recall the coifs of Jane Russell and Wonder Woman. As she turned to face the window, Jim saw from her ghost-pale face, with somber eye shadow and imperious scarlet mouth, that innocence had long been displaced by hard-won experience.

Jim stared mesmerized as the woman glanced once at the motionless, bee-covered figure and then walked to the fireplace and halted, looking down into the flames. He was sure that somewhere, somehow, he had seen her before, either lifeside or in the hereafter, but he was unable to dredge time, place, or circumstance from his fragmented recall. His first thought was of the strange and hazily recalled woman in the hallucination during his alien sex encounter, but no, it couldn’t be her. He knew instinctively that she had been fundamentally different.

The woman inside the room contemplated the fire for a few moments, then straightened her shoulders and turned. Jim was just able to catch the expression of weary sadness that preceded this visible hardening of her resolve. She moved with the air of a woman following orders. In the exact center of the room, she positioned herself facing the fire and stood very erect. Her hands moved in a series of ritually complex motions. The air in front of her shimmered and then a dark circular walnut table suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The table was a pretty neat trick on its own, even without the simultaneous materialization of a number of objects arranged on its surface in what looked like a symbolic pattern. All the kinetic materialization Jim had ever managed was a less than reliable ability to pluck the odd, usually stale cigarette out of thin air, and that didn’t always work. The woman in red leather was clearly a past mistress in the art of raising objects from nowhere.

The stuff on the table struck even Jim as a little strange, although hardly out of character with what he’d seen of the place so far. A long rapier, resting on a needle point and with ornate hilt, bisected the table. To one side of it lay a coiled cat-o’-nine-tails, with a Lucite handle, made from translucent optical fibers and with a tiny glowing sphere at the end of each individual lash. A branding iron in the shape of a curlicued letter S reposed on the other side of the sword, along with three square-headed iron nails at least nine inches long, a cell phone, and a clamplike device constructed from solid chrome. Jim had no idea of the purpose of this last object, except a suspicion that it was intended to cause some manner of protracted pain, likely as not to human male genitals. An earthenware jug of the kind that traditionally contained corn liquor was set slightly apart from the other items. The woman considered these objects for a few moments, then picked up the whip and flicked it experimentally,
spreading the plastic thongs. As the scourge swished in the air, the tiny spheres glowed brighter, but the effect didn’t seem to please the woman. She recoiled the whip and returned it to the table. Now she picked up the sword, and as with the whip, she swung it testingly. The cold steel seemed more to her liking, and with the sword still in her right hand, she reached for the cell phone, at the same time glancing toward the door through which she had entered. Jim could hear her clearly as she spoke into the phone. “Inform Morrison that the Lady Semple has readied herself for his attendance.”

Jim twitched. Morrison? Was she talking to him? He quickly looked around, but no sign indicated his presence had been detected. He turned back to the window and saw that a third figure had come into the room. This one Jim recognized instantly. It was him. Out of shape, with half a beard, a flabby beer gut hanging over the concha belt of his leather jeans, and the ravages of depravity and dissolution clearly showing, it was unmistakably an older version of himself.

The older Morrison halted beside the table and stood looking down at the floor. The woman in red put down the cell phone and flexed the blade of the rapier into a tempered steel arc. “So you haven’t changed your mind?”

The two so clearly knew each other that Jim, outside the window, wondered if his foggy recognition of the woman was some kind of displaced front-end memory at work. Inside the room, the older Morrison raised his head and met the woman’s gaze. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”

“There’s still time.”

“I know that.”

“But you’re determined to challenge my cruelty?”

“Do I really have any other choice? We’ve come too far to turn back now.”

The woman shrugged slightly. “Then you’d better remove your shirt.”

The older Morrison was wearing an embroidered Mexican wedding shirt and, as he slowly stripped it off, any doubts that Jim might have had that this temporally advanced version of himself drank too much and got virtually no exercise were put to rest by the sight of his bare torso and fish-belly flesh. The woman in red again flexed the sword. “Then you know what to do, don’t you?”

The older Morrison sighed with almost overwhelming world-weariness and reached for the jug. As far as Jim could gather, the upcoming ceremony was now so routine it was approaching a tedious normality. “Yes, I know what to do.”

The woman flicked the sword, creating an impatient staccato whoosh. “Then you don’t need a drink first. Just do it.”

The older Morrison put down the jug and moved to face the fireplace. He placed his hands well apart on the mantel, his arms all but fully extended. He leaned forward slightly so his pants legs wouldn’t be scorched by the flames. In that position, the mantel came to just below his chin. He moved his feet slightly apart as though starting to brace himself. His head was lowered; he might have been staring down at the flames, or perhaps his eyes were closed. Jim couldn’t quite see. The woman put the sword down on the table again, then picked up the branding iron and examined it, turning it over in her gloved hands. “My first thought was that at last it was time for me to brand you.”

The older Morrison’s shoulders tensed. “So brand me. You, if anyone, should know enough to follow your instinct.”

Two Viet Cong appeared in the doorway and stood silently watching. One was wearing a
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
T-shirt; Jim could only assume it was the same Charlie he had seen in the swamp, unless
X-Files
shirts were a trend among the Jurassic VC. Either the woman was ignoring the two guerrillas or she was unable to see them. She returned the branding iron to the table. “But then I changed my mind. I decided branding was a little too, shall we say, final. It would constitute a fresh benchmark in our relationship.”

“Avoid fresh benchmarks at all costs.”

The woman picked up the sword again. “Are you being funny?”

“As funny as it’s possible to be in this position.”

“Then that settles it.”

Jim on the outside and the VC on the inside watched as the older Morrison turned his head slightly. “Settles what?”

“I’m going to carve my initials on you.”

“You’ve done that before.”

The woman extended the point of the blade so it was not quite touching the skin of Morrison’s back. “So it’s no benchmark.”

The older Morrison’s flesh crawled visibly as though anticipating the slicing kiss of cold steel. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as jaded as he first seemed. He sighed, either in sadness or surrender. “That’s true.”