Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (43 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you have a cigarette?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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