Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (78 page)

A large number of nuns and angels ran straight for the lake to wash away the gore. Among them was Semple, who had a clot of brain tissue lodged in her hair, but most came to a halt before they reached the water’s edge. Already spooked by the wind-walk and the subsequent vile disaster and explosion, the sight of a huge white letterbox-format screen, more than seventy feet across, rising majestically from the waters of the lake had the majority of them down on their knees, praying for their souls and sanity. The screen continued to rise until it was floating ten feet above the surface, with no visible means of support. It was hardly a biblical apparition, neither a leviathan nor a burning bush. Either of those might have been more understandable to the nuns. At least they would have been congruent with their religious zeal. Something so techno-geometric filled them with more irrational dread than the sight of Jonah’s whale, a pillar of fire, or the Archangel Gabriel playing a Miles Davis composition on his trumpet.

Jim was probably one of the first to realize what it was: a big Diamond Vision projection TV screen of the kind that had come into use at big-time stadium rock concerts a few years after his death. Certainly, along with Doc and Semple, he was one of the few who didn’t go into a paroxysm of Pentecostal confusion when the first image appeared on the screen. To Jim’s relief, it wasn’t some rerun of a middle-aged Mick Jagger in concert, but a logo sequence of a
woman’s arm brandishing a gleaming sword, rising slowly from a crystal-clear, pristine lake that put Aimee’s stagnant body of water to shame. The arm was accompanied by a written legend in veveVoodoo characters. After holding for about twenty seconds, it was replaced by three huge and formidable close-ups of Dr. Hypodermic, Danbhala La Flambeau, and Baron Tonnerre. They peered from the screen as though, via some two-way system, they were seeing the inhabitants of Heaven just as the inhabitants were seeing them.

After carefully inspecting whatever image they were viewing, Hypodermic glanced at La Flambeau. “It’s all going according to plan, wouldn’t you say?”

Although Jim well knew that gods were impossibly hard to read, they seemed inordinately pleased at the ravages that Aimee’s Heaven had so far suffered. Doc glanced at Jim. “What do you think they’re doing this for?”

La Flambeau leaned forward as though searching for something. Finally she spotted what she sought, smiled, and pointed. “There you are, Jim Morrison. And Doc Holliday, too. Where’s the McPherson girl?”

“She’s washing her hair. She got somebody’s brains in it.”

La Flambeau glanced at the male gods on either side of her and then looked down at Jim and Doc. “The Doctor and the Baron don’t particularly want to admit it, but we all feel that all three of you have done an excellent job.”

Jim and Doc looked at each other in surprise. “We have?”

“Indeed you have. This place is now a shambles and no new religion is going to start up here.”

Doc raised a dangerous eyebrow. “And that’s what we’ve been doing? Putting down self-appointed deities?”

Jim was thinking. “What I don’t understand is why you should need us to do the dirty work. I mean, you’re gods—you’re all-powerful. You could have taken out Anubis with a deftly aimed thunderbolt anytime you wanted.”

The Baron scowled. Jim had never heard him speak in English before and his voice rolled out like thunder on the mountain. “We’re gods, little man. We have more important considerations to absorb our time and our energy. We’re too ancient to get our own hands dirty. And why should we, when we can manipulate the human dead to do it for us?”

La Flambeau smiled indulgently. “The McPherson girl set in motion
a chain of events that caused Gojiro to destroy both Moses and Anubis. And then these women crucified the one who wanted to be Jesus. And now you appear to have neutralized the absurd Aimee and this equally ridiculous Bernadette who calls herself the Hammer of God.”

Unfortunately, Bernadette chose that moment to demonstrate that she wasn’t quite as neutralized as La Flambeau might have assumed. She stood up in eighteen inches of dirty water, where she’d been washing the blood from her hands and face, and stared truculently at the big screen. “Listen, you trio of abominations. I am a servant of the One True God—”

Doc attempted to head her off. “Trixie, my dear, I advise you to table this defiant little speech of yours. You can’t even start to comprehend the kind of power you’re going up against.”

Bernadette glanced back at Doc but decided to ignore him. Once again she faced the screen. “I am the servant of God and nothing you demons can do will deflect me from my purpose.” She gestured to Doc and Jim. “I have the protection of faith around me, and if I decide to crucify these agents of Lucifer that you send against me, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Some of the red nuns seemed encouraged enough to start retrieving their guns. Jim feared that defeat was about be snatched from the jaws of victory, and he shouted at the Mystères, “I know you don’t like to get your hands dirty, but why the fuck don’t you zap her right now and save us all a whole lot of trouble?”

The smile with which La Flambeau responded to Jim was nothing short of patronizing. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much,
mes petits
. She is an alarmingly stupid human being and very soon she is actually going to meet her One True God.”

When she heard a sound behind her, Semple spun around and grabbed for the machine pistol, spraying water from her wet hair like a dog coming in from the rain. Only the sound of a familiar voice stopped her from firing blind. “Semple, it’s all right, it’s only me.”

Semple had been bent over what might well have been the last functioning sink in Heaven, washing the brains out of her hair with some of Heaven’s remaining hot water. Realizing she wasn’t going
to get properly clean in the chaos by the lake, she had hunted through rubble-strewn rooms to find this final intact bathroom. By way of a precaution, she had picked up a red nun’s machine pistol that had been dropped in the confusion, and she didn’t lower it as she pushed her hair out of her eyes and regarded Aimee with slit-eyed distrust. Her sibling stood in the doorway of the bathroom in a filthy robe. “Please Semple. . . . ”

Semple’s lip curled. “Please Semple, what? Maybe I should just shoot you right there where you’re standing.”

“I know I did a bad thing, but . . . ”

“You know I’ve literally been to Hell and back since you saw me last?”

A hairline crack snaked across the ceiling. Both Aimee and Semple looked up at it. “If someone doesn’t stabilize this place, we’re going to be in an empty void without even a place to stand.”

“This Jim of yours, he could help pull Heaven back together?”

“Jim? Are you out of your mind? He’s not the Heaven-building type. He hates bluebirds.”

“He’d do it for you, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe for a while, but in the end he’d get bored and want to move on.”

“Could he at least help to stabilize it?”

Semple sighed and lowered the gun. “I suppose he might, but it wouldn’t stop there, would it? I know you, Aimee. You always have to push it. You always have to have that little bit more.”

“If this place falls apart, I’ll be finished.”

“You’ll survive, Aimee.”

“Will I? You’ve seen what happened when we were separated.”

“If Jim wants to leave, I’m going with him.”

“You’d choose a man over your sister? You’d just leave me to waste away and vanish?”

Semple turned; she couldn’t face her sister. “Shit, Aimee, don’t the guilt trips ever stop?”

Jim was becoming more than a little concerned about the deteriorating condition of the environment. It had been a mess when they had arrived; now it was becoming messier by the minute. Jagged orange-white lightning crashed between huge thunderheads that
were rapidly moving in from beyond the mountains. The lake moved with bizarre and chaotic ripples, and huge bubbles broke the surface. The great screen still hung over it, but the images of the Mystères were continuously distorted. The ground under Jim’s feet quivered, while on the headland a small but growing wind vortex whirled dirt, dead leaves, and the limp, lifeless corpses of bluebirds into the air. In the middle of it all, Bernadette was attempting to rally her nuns and angels. Jim yelled to Doc, “By the looks of it, we’ve got some apocalyptic trouble coming hard down on us.”

A sudden sinkhole, some twenty feet wide, opened in the terrace, right under the scarlet Tiger tank. The machine crashed down into it and its gas tank exploded, shooting flame, black smoke, and chunks of hot metal into the air. Doc coughed blood into his hankerchief and shook his head. “And I fear this is the bona fide end of the world. At least for this cosmic neck of the cosmic woods.”

In confirmation of just how bona fide the end of the world really was, a great light like something from the Book of Revelation blossomed in the sky. A nun began screaming, “It’s God, I see God!”

Doc stared at the sky with a resigned and quizzical expression. “Either that or a thermonuclear airburst was just added to our catalogue of woe.”

A section of corridor ceiling crashed down behind Aimee and Semple, and the two of them broke into a run. A crystal chandelier was dripping liquid glass like melting ice. The vibration was now worse than the worst earthquake Semple had ever experienced in lifeside Los Angeles or San Francisco. She was still carrying the gun she’d found, but she had little idea as to what she was going to do next. Her single impulse was to get out into the open before the entire structure collapsed and buried them. She imagined that if one was buried alive it could take an agonizing time to expire and that wasn’t the way she wanted to return to the pods, fighting for breath as dirt filled her mouth, nose, and lungs, and chunks of masonry crushed her bones. Her only thought was to get back to Jim and Doc, and if relying on the two men was the best she could come up with, she knew she was tactically tapped out.

The building shook again and a huge chunk of plaster smashed
into the floor directly in front of them. Aimee stumbled over a fallen beam and would have gone down if Semple hadn’t grabbed her by the arm. “Just keep moving, okay? Just keep moving.”

Aime clung to Semple, her grip like a vice. “Semple, promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“Promise you won’t let me just disappear into nothing.”