Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (49 page)

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 Mystère 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
animé
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.”