Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (68 page)

Jim had never seen these new gods before, but their names seemed to reverberate in his head: Kadia Bossou, Baron Le Croix, Mam’zelle Charlotte, Erzulie Taureau, Zantahi Medeh, Ou-An Ille, Gougonne Dan Leh, Man Ivan, An We-Zo, Zaou Pemba, Ti Jean Pied-Cheche, Papa Houng’to. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, they gathered around the outer perimeter of the spiral. Every single one of them would have been enough on his or her own to strike terror in the bravest of mortals; en masse, they were formidable to the point of overkill. Towering figures, in robes and headdresses, uniforms or the alluring near-nudity of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme. Some weren’t even in any approximation of human form. Erzulie Taureau was a massive Babylonian bull with gilded horns and garlands of orchids, Adahi Loko was a similarly exotic elephant, and Baron Azagon was nothing more than a living flame. As they crowded and jostled for position, auras collided and sectors of energy sparked shorts of power, headdresses bobbed and weaved, and the saber of Ogou Baba became entangled in the flowing train of Mam’zelle Charlotte, while his stallion plunged and pranced, nervous in such a vibrant crowd. The only god who was given absolute space to go and do where and what she liked was the venerable Marie-Louise.

The spectacle was such that Jim would have stopped and stared openmouthed, but Danbhala La Flambeau had told him not to stop for any reason, and he wasn’t about to buck that program now that the gods had arrived. Jim went right on walking. La Flambeau hadn’t told him not to look, and as he walked he took in every detail of this sight that few, if any, mortal humans had ever witnessed. Maybe, if he came through all this intact, he really would return to his poetry. The gathering was so close to impossible that it just had to be recorded. At the same time, though, Jim could feel that something was happening to him. Cultures as far apart as the Anastazi in New Mexico and the Druids in England had employed the power of the spiral in their religious and ecstatic ceremonies and rituals. The belief had been that to walk the spiral was, in many ways, an intoxication similar to ingesting yage, peyote, or psilocybin, and as Jim progressed along the endless circular path to the center, he started to subscribe very strongly to that arcane belief. At first it was hard to
tell if anything was really amiss, whether he might be entering an altered state. To spot a hallucination is hard in a place where reality at its most normal is an almost hallucinatory condition.

By the third circuit, however, Jim was well aware that the gods had started to lurch and flow one into another, and even the ground beneath his feet was taking on some unique tactile wave patterns. Jim was getting strangely high, flying without benefit of wings, but it certainly wasn’t an unpleasant experience. He could hear the soaring tone of a distant Jimi Hendrix guitar echoing out from some other place on the mountain, and it occurred to him to question why Jimi, the Voodoo Child, wasn’t there at the gathering. He certainly deserved his place. Maybe he was elsewhere on the island, maybe the echoing guitar was real. Jim recalled their obscenely drunken nights at Steve Paul’s Scene in New York City and the last time the two had seen each other at the troubled British open-air rock festival on the Isle of Wight, just human weeks before the two of them had died. “If you’re here, man, get on down and help me out.”

Jim wasn’t joking. His legs were becoming increasingly rubbery and he was having some difficulty staying on the curving path. The inclination to lurch off to the left was increasingly powerful, but La Flambeau held him to making every effort to stay the course. No help came, however. Quite the reverse. The gods seemed to believe that Jim was the key to something and each had something to say to him. They talked at him in a way that made the words throb physically in his head, drowning out the sound of the guitar.

“We used to be the link between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.”

“But no longer.”

“Humans now come through in numbers that increase out of all proportion.”

Jim could feel the gods’ eyes boring into him.

“The humans push us farther and farther from our ancient domains, until all we have left is this island.”

“Humans die and humans die and they go on dying.”

Jim was starting to feel that the Voodoo gods held him personally responsible for their troubles. He wanted to turn and protest, but still he kept walking.

“The numbers of them expand and expand again. All the time, more and more humans crowd into what was once our world.”

As he rounded the curve that brought him to the point where he
was moving back toward the megaliths, he clearly saw the red eyes of Dr. Hypodermic among all of the others. “It surely can’t be that bad.”

Hypodermic’s eyes glowed angrily in the darkness. “It’s worse than bad.”

“But you can’t hold me responsible. I didn’t want to die. I would happily have gone on living, well into the twenty-first century.”

“You humans have no respect for the unique properties of this Afterlife. You stab it with knives in the heart of the dawn. You shatter the patterns of harmony. You pay no respect to those who were here before. You waste its pure base energy in the shaping of diseased environments, built from false memories and evil dreams. You rip and you plunder, trampling underfoot the magical potential of the true treasures.”

In the background, the Hendrix guitar wailed a sustained note of raw bleak grief.

“You have all but doomed your own lifeside world and you seek to do the same to ours.”

The painfully beautiful face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, surrounded by a halo of black diamond flame, floated into Jim’s increasingly psychedelic field of vision. Jim suddenly found himself aching for the god-woman, unable to stand her expression of sad reproach. “For us, the fruitfulness of humanity is the curse of extinction. We gods, spirits, and demons are an endangered species. Do you want to see us gone from this place?”

Jim kept walking. Unbidden tears ran down his face. All he wanted was for Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme to enfold him in her arms and tell him that he was forgiven, but still he managed to keep on walking. He knew if he stopped, everything would fail. “Of course not. You’re the gods.”

The face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme was replaced by that of the incalculably ancient Marie-Louise. “Then you will do anything that we ask of you?”

The trip was becoming desperate. “Of course I will. You already know that. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“You don’t have to be told. You will know.”

Jim could feel his sanity slipping, but he kept on walking. “You keep telling me that.”

The bright black eyes in the shrunken wrinkled face penetrated clear into Jim’s soul. “That is the first thing we require of you. You must make the leap of faith. The blind leap of faith.”

Jim shook his head. The center of the circle was very close. “I’ve been leaping blind all my days. I was the fucking Lizard King!”

Marie-Louis smiled as though Jim had finally stated the obvious. “That’s why you were selected.”

The curving path ended in a flat, circular, blood-red stone, engraved with the Sword of La Place, dividing it into the equal and opposite halves, pethro and rada, the alive and the dead, the good and the evil, while the symbols of the joukoujou veves extended all around the circumference. Without knowing why, only that it needed to be done, Jim deliberately placed one foot on either side of the sword. Then he turned and screamed to the gods, “So what do I do now?”

“Face the stones.”

Jim slowly did what he was told and saw the stars. Between the stones, exactly framed by the two uprights and the lintel they supported, a geometric arrangement of nine stars blazed unwinkingly, only visible from the exact center of the spiral.

“Okay, I see the stars. It still doesn’t tell me what I do now.”

“When the other one arrives, it will begin.”

The flames reached out, encircling and enclosing, encompassing all the fragments that had once been Semple McPherson. The flames warmed them . . . no, more than warmed, they were being heated, moving them together, fusing one piece to the next, solidifying their integrity. Inert molecules once more moved. Old connections started to re-form, and sundered synapses began exchanging tentative sparks of data. Semple—and once more she could just about think of herself as Semple—knew an armature of being was somehow being reconstituted. She wasn’t functional enough to hope, but something was definitely happening, right in Limbo, where nothing should be happening. At the same time as this perception came to her, she was also aware of another presence beside her own, a presence that seemed to have come with the flames and the warmth. It might have been the flames themselves, but there was more to it than that. The presence radiated a comforting, if implacable strength, a strength Semple had no desire to go against, but a strength that, at that moment, was slowly and surely restoring her soul.

“What are you?”

“I am Danbhala La Flambeau and I have come to bring you out of here.”

“I don’t understand. My sister, my other half, blasted me into Limbo. It’s over for me.”

“Your sister made an angry error. Your course is not yet run.”

“My course?”

“I am Danbhala La Flambeau and I have come to bring you out of Limbo and back to the familiar Paths of the Dead.”

The lightning came right out of the formation of stars, and the crash of thunder that went with it all but deafened Jim. At the same time, the flash when the lightning struck the spiral completely, if temporarily, blinded him. He cringed away from the violent blue-white electrical explosion but still didn’t step out of the blood-red central circle, and his feet remained planted on either side of the Sword of La Place. Why was it that the gods had to work with so many explosions and in so many sudden furious rushes? Jim didn’t need to be any further dazzled or impressed. He was convinced. He would have yelled through the ringing in his ears, but he knew it was pointless. The gods would do what the gods had to do, without outside consultation and regardless of little things like whether one insignificant human went blind, deaf, or crazy. These sons of bitches were jerking him around the way their Greek counterparts had jerked around poor fucking Oedipus.

“If I’m so fucking insignificant, why do you feel the need to fuck with me so much?”

Even when his vision started to clear, he could see little on the other side of the spiral except an ion-shattered mist. It was only as it started to dissipate that he saw the figure of the woman. She stood swaying and then stumbled slightly. Jim couldn’t believe that she’d come with the lightning. “Semple?”

The gods had finally brought them together? For a purpose that only the gods knew? He was about to step out of the circle and go to her, but then the presence of Danbhala La Flambeau was everywhere in the spiral, authoritative and urgent. “Stay where you are! Let her come to the center! Don’t go to her or you’ll lose her!”

Jim froze. His instincts told him to go with his humanity and run to her, but the compulsion to obey La Flambeau couldn’t be fought.
“Semple, it’s me, it’s Jim Morrison. We met in space and again in Hell. Follow the path. Quickly. Come to where I am. Just follow the path. You can make it.”

Semple looked around, shaky and disorientated, but Jim could only suppose that she, too, was picking up the urgency from Danbhala La Flambeau. She quickly pulled herself together and started to walk along the flagstones of the spiral. After a half dozen paces, she stumbled, but regained her grip and began walking again.