The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  Hubbard spent twenty minutes wriggling on the pin, and Jesus let him. It wasn’t a denial of His existence, apparently, it was a desire to allow people to free themselves of the traumas of their past, to enable them to live freely. Of course it says that the souls (thetans) of people on earth have lived on other planets, but ‘planet’ could be a euphemism for any other place, couldn’t it? He’d never made claims for it to be a religion.

  He was sweating profusely, a rare trait in an old man. The suit he wore, an unfortunate shade of beige, was patched with dampness.

  “So why call it a ‘Church’?”

  “Ok. Ok. Maybe that was wrong, but one little mistake? Saved a fortune in tax. We have thousands of followers. We deserve representation.”

  “But no apocalypse.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You don’t envision an ending, a revelation. Just some piffle about Xenu bringing everyone to earth in spaceships. No great reckoning. So why should you be in the main chamber to discuss the Apocalypse?”

  Hubbard looked at his shoes, scratched the side of his head where a thin line of sweat made its descent, then took a deep breath and made his pitch.

  “Millions of followers.”

  “Thousands.”

  “Many thousands. A force for good. Training our youth to behave appropriately. We work against drug addiction!” Hubbard gazed at Jesus’ bored face. “It’s not taking, is it?”

  The Son of God shook his head, hoping that his hair fell correctly, like in the shampoo adverts.

  “Worth a try, Ron. L. L Ron.” He said. “It’s bollocks, isn’t it?”

  “Worth a try, though.” said Hubbard, and then he stood, pulled down the tips of his suit jacket and walked from the room with a surprising amount of dignity.

  “You can come out, now.” Jesus said. The curtain behind of him quivered and then Xenu, the dictator of the Galactic Conspiracy, sidled into the room and doubled up with laughter.

  “What a complete tosser!” he said.

  “Tell me about it.” said Jesus.

  It went on for what seemed, but absolutely wasn’t, an eternity.

  “What’s with the pants?” said Jesus, actually really impressed with the beard of Brigham Young.

  “Oh, alright, I got a kicker from the manufacturer.” Young put his hand to his face and sobbed.

  “Comfy, though.” Said Jesus, lifting his robe to reveal the Mormon undergarment as its progenitor left the room.

  Towards the end of the process, Jesus realized he was actually having fun. The breadth of incoherence invented by these megalomaniacs was incredible, laughable, and to an extent admirable. Oh to have been in the United States of America in the Twentieth Century when anyone with any kind of charisma could come up with propositions of mind-boggling idiocy and still make a fortune and have women stripping in front of them all the time. Perhaps he should have a word with his dad and see if there was other stuff he could do. He was over thirty, after all. Couldn’t play the martyr all his life.

  As God cleared his throat to bring the meeting to order he was aware of the central issue they were going to face. All of the religions present agreed that there would be an apocalypse, or revelation, but there were deep divisions as to how it would happen and what it would comprise. He could, he supposed, just say; look, I’ll decide on the final reckoning and that’s all there is to be said about the matter, but it’s a long old immortality, and a bit of healthy democratic discussion helped the time pass. The risk was non-existent, anyway. As the God of all the Judeo-Christian sects he had enough votes to carry the day even if everyone else could come to some agreement, which was by no means guaranteed. Whatever was decided, they had to find a way to neutralise the strengths of the Devil so vividly portrayed in Armageddon 15.

  What they really needed from all of this was some kind of composite Armageddon that allowed the followers of all of them to be able to say “told you so”: He had no particular desire to bring about disappointment for millions of believers. What he had never been able to understand was why the earthly representatives had been so keen to bandy around numbers about how long things would take. You were just going to, in that way, leave yourself hostage to fortune, since even He hadn’t decided, and there were external factors like his therapy regime, and, well, Satan, who was a bit of a wild card.

  The Hindus had the world somewhere in the age of Kali, which lasts 432,000 years, the Christians have a thousand years after the last battle between Good and Evil (always too round a number, he thought), and the Sunnis believe that the end will be foretold by the appearance of The Mahdi, who will rule for between 7 and 19 years, the inexactitude of which, conversely, he rather admired. The Buddhists expect their prophet’s teachings to disappear after five thousand years, but conveniently don’t offer a start date. He also had a massive soft spot for the Baha’i, who get round the problem by saying it’s already happened.

  Haile Selassie, still in full uniform, spent all of his time telling everyone that he had no idea what he was doing there, which illustrates the problem of being made a God after you’ve lost the chance to tell everyone you are just a bloke in a peaked cap. He had actually had to be given a book explaining his own Rastafarian religion, and was even now mystified as to how he would bring home the lost children of Israel to Africa. Or even how he might find them in the first place.

  Odin, massive in leather and fur, plates of metal strapped around his massive arms and legs, sporting a beard that could have been woven from flax, spent most of the time growling at the others and breaking into the occasional guttural snort of derision. Since Ragnarok, their local conflict between the Gods and the forces of Chaos led by Loki, he had few cares for the next Reckoning. His own aegis was filled with squabbling sons and grandsons, leaving him with times when he would have welcomed some wholesale cleansing of all worlds. Still, at least he had at least not committed himself to a time for the ultimate showdown, giving him the chance to see the alternatives on offer and pick up on whichever one he fancied. The role he adopted in all of these meetings was of a man on the outside very very hard and inside very very deep.

  “I’m a bit concerned,” said God, “that I. We. Might have been sleeping on the job. All of you, well most of you, have managed to sell a pretty similar vision of the end times. First, a world of declining morality, war and pestilence, an uncaring world with massive disparity and disunity,”

  “Like now.” said Kali, the Hindu God.

  “Like now.” God agreed. “But then like a few other periods, if I’m honest. It all went a bit shit when I spent that century learning how to ski on Mount Olympus.”

  “Not my fault,” Zeus grumbled, “we had an offer on. Besides, we don’t even have an apocalypse. We just rule forever, basically.”

  “You made the bloody word up, though, didn’t you?” Kali said. “That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one.”

  “Well you lot couldn’t even be bothered to make up different words for your own Gods. How come there’s a Kali God and a Kali demon? You should have given us a call. We could have figured out a few names for you.”

  “You’re redundant. Find me anyone in Greece who believes in you. Well, anyone who isn’t in a home. I’m still part of the iconography, mate.” Zeus pushed his chair back, bristling, but God broke in with a weary sigh.

  “Alright, alright. We’re all on the same side, remember? The fact is, The Devil is better prepared than us. We all talk about the End Times, then some kind of battle, then the good folk get to Heaven and everyone else is cursed-“

  “We don’t.” said Moses. “We’re just going to gather in the diaspora, the mashiach, then you or someone you send will come along and then we’ll resurrect the Tsadikim. Job done.”

  “You should have given him some vocabulary,” Kali said to Zeus. “It just sounds like someone clearing his throat.”

  “He’s nearly right.” Ahura Mazda (the creator of Zoroastrian beliefs, not the head of the car company), wave
d a wizened hand towards Moses. “Job not done. We have to have universal purification after we’ve raised the dead.”

  “Universal?” Moses looked aghast. “Are you mad? That means we’ll get all sorts of riff-raff in eternity.” Mazda spread his arms and shrugged as if to signify that the process was none of his doing. “Anyway,” Moses continued, warming to his theme, “what are you doing in here? Shouldn’t you be next door with the charlatans?”

  Mazda reddened. “We’ve been going longer than you have, you bloody arriviste.” He made as if to stand.

  “Look, look, look.” God made a calming gesture. “I don’t want to get stuck in the process per se. And let’s just assume that everyone in here has a good reason to be heard. What concerns me is that I don’t think we’re adequately prepared for the battle that all of us; all of you; well, all of me, I suppose, have said will happen.”

  “We won’t want to be involved in any battles.” said Buddha Maitreya, gently moving a wandering ladybird to a safe place beneath his chair. Both Zeus and Odin, not averse to fisticuffs, looked at him askance.

  “Ok, okay. You can make the refreshments or something. Broadly speaking, decay, impiety, inhumanity; massive rumble; good guys get to Heaven. It’s what we’ve been telling them for ages. Main thing is, how can we be sure we can win the battle? They have legions of warriors and demons who care nothing for their own safety. Dragons and beasts of the field that love the taste of blood. Murderers, mass-murderers, and evil geniuses. We’ve got some good singing voices and a touching faith in the power of good.”

  The assembled Gods looked to the table, at their fingernails, into the air for inspiration.

  It was Izanagi, the Shinto creator of the cosmos, who broke the unhelpful silence.

  “We could cheat.” he said.

  8

  Construction of the Entertainment Complex gathered pace. Ron had decided that it would be best set upon the rise on which he had located his site office, which meant a wholesale move of the paraphernalia of management: the trestle table, some pens, and a loudhailer. The position was logical as it meant that they could build a terrace offering a lovely view out over the chalet park and beyond to the distant water.

  “Brilliant, Ron.” Said Guntrick, “then we can see who is stealing stuff.”

  “Stealing? Why would anybody be stealing?”

  “I’ll post sentries here 24/7. All suspicious activity will be stamped upon.”

  “You mean we’ll ask them what they are up to?” said Ron, having a horrible feeling he knew the answer to that.

  “Of course!” Blessed relief. “And then we’ll stamp upon them. You know us, Ron. Bad cop and badder cop.”

  “I’d kind of seen this as a relaxing place for people to sit in the sunshine and look at the view, relax, chat to their neighbours. That kind of thing.”

  “We’ll be in mufti, Ron. We’ll fade into the background.”

  Ron looked at Guntrick. He was nearly seven feet tall, and had hair so wild it made Jimi Hendrix look like Cary Grant. He was wearing his beard, ginger, in an offset pattern at the moment. Guntrick wore a pair of wolf-skin trousers he’d had on for one and a half millennia. The coat he wore, his original one having been lost to Ron at poker, was a classic Burberry trench, which he in turn had gained after a drinking game with a merchant banker who thought two bottles of Crystal was giving it some serious effort. Fade into the background?

  Wondering how to broach the point that the Visigoths had about as much chance of blending in as a Bald Eagle at a Mouse Convention, Ron cast his eyes into the field before him, where work was still going on to construct the chalet park.

  At the far end, there was a screen around the tin construction Magritte was working on. No one was allowed in. Every now and then a cry of ‘Bien sûr!” or “Bon truc!” emanated from somewhere within, but everyone had become accustomed now, and ignored it, as if it were in fact part of something else entirely.

  A small chain gang from a 1950s American Penitentiary was constructing pathways between the chalets. Its members were in the main deeply black, muscled and shirtless, rhythmic in their work, although the shackles on their legs gave them little room to improvise. They were five altogether, the middle one being Cleet, a skinny white guy with a pronounced overbite and a major problem with subcutaneous sebum. He seemed willing, but was basically dragged in whatever direction the gang moved, like seaweed in an oceanic current. And this was how it would remain, for they were conjoined for as long as their judgement was in abeyance.

  Two women from Tamil Nadu were clearing an area they were planning to enflower, each with brightly coloured saris patched with dried blood. An Inuit edged forward on all fours, plucking stones from the ground and adding them to a cairn at the foot of the rise. A Yanomami shaman in a top hat made of corn stalks danced and chanted, rattling a gourd over anyone who made the mistake of straying into his endlessly variable personal space.

  He looked back to Guntrick. This was a background into which he could fade, after all.

  The unveiling of the result of René’s hard work took place a couple of days later. As the Entertainment Complex took shape, the sheets of tin forming the walls and roof slotted into place, the wooden terrace stretching out in front, he had laboured, largely ignored, behind the canvas screens. He finally emerged, his thin figure smudged with paint, and proclaimed to Ron that he was ready to reveal all to an expectant world.

  They gathered amongst the completed chalets, Ron with the steering wheel impaled in his chest, Ethel virtually unmarked, a horde of Visigoths bearing all the scars of their violent lives, the chain gang, the Indian women, the Inuit and the rainforest medicine man.

  René pulled aside the screens, and turned to them with his arms spread wide.

  “I call it, “Ce n’est pas un caravan” he proclaimed.

  They stared. René appeared to have taken up his days in isolation with dismantling the chalet and moving it to a distant spot in the woods. Grass lay before it, the trunks of trees to its side and beyond. There was silence.

  “Come, Ron, Ethel!” said the Belgian, excitedly. He beckoned them towards the place where the construction had been before his effort. Not quite what Ron had in mind, it was fair to say.

  Ethel urged him forward, leaning to whisper in his ear.

  “Say something nice, dear. It’s taken him a week.”

  They were brought to a halt abruptly, bumping against something solid even though the chalet was still some distance away. Ron stepped back and walked forward again, as though this were some kind of force field that would by now have disappeared. It hadn’t. He stopped with a clang.

  Ethel looked at René, who grinned at them expectantly. Ron stretched his arms and tapped the air to either side of him, rewarded with more clanging.

  “It’s the chalet, Ron,” said Ethel, giggling like a little girl, “ this is the chalet, but René’s painted it to look like it’s further away.” René nodded, and Ron felt the solid wall with his fingers.

  “Look!” Said René, reaching to Ron’s right, to grab a piece of a tree trunk. He swung open the door, revealing the unfurnished stark interior of the tin box. There was a gasp from behind them, and at least half of the watching group fell to their knees and began to pray to a variety of gods. The shaman was on his knees, arms raised to the skies, chanting.

  “And look!” René held out his arm once more, to where the distant replica chalet stood, painted on the side of the real one. He pinched a small protruberance between finger and thumb and pulled open the facsimile door, grinning with deep joy. It was like a little caravan advent calendar. With one door and no chocolate.

  “It’s fantastic, René.” said Ethel, smiling at the old man, who tipped an imaginary bowler hat. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Should think not, Ethel,” Ron said, stepping back from the artwork, “there’s a reason caravans are painted white with a coloured horizontal stripe, you know.”

  “What’s that, then, l
ove?”

  “It’ll come to me.” he huffed.

  They all sat, in the evening, on the partially assembled terrace, and looked at the regular pattern of tin shacks with, at the end, the illusion of a single one set distantly in the woods, as though its occupants were in quarantine. The chalet; the real one, was now vaguely outlined in the fading light. Ron yawned. There was no non-fatiguing way to explain to Visigoths, Inuits, Indians, and tribal shamen the concept of an optical illusion. The chain gang had given up early and clanked off for a sleep, despite Cleet’s wish to hang around for a while. In the way of this Afterworld, where bewildered souls were sentenced to wander for decades and sometimes centuries, activity was a magnet. On the streets of London, a single person standing in the street and pointing upwards will in due course be joined by a pool of others, who gaze similarly to the heavens. Try to manoeuvre an upright piano through a window in Los Angeles, Loskopdam or Losheim and before you could play the opening riff of The Entertainer a dozen people would be giving you advice on how best to achieve your objective. Well, maybe not in Losheim, where it probably infringes some German Ordinance to shift musical instruments through windows on Tuesdays, but even there a crowd would gather to tell you to stop.

  The dead, the damaged, the delirious, all were unable to resist the allure of somebody actually doing something, and the sound of a hammer hitting a nail could attract wanderers from miles around. Ron had been present at Deadstock, the afterlife music festival that attracted over half a million bodies in various states of disrepair, at which he had to accept that Dame Nellie Melba had become a convert to Thrash Metal. He had even organised the Afterworld Cup, a football championship to which the dead flocked in their thousands, even if the nearest they had been to football in their lives was kicking around the severed heads of the vanquished, who themselves could possibly have been sitting in the grandstand.

  Already, the perimeters of his latest development were starting to show signs of what, in this environment, passed for life. Dusk had arrived, and fireflies popped in the trees at the far end of the field. There were small fires flickering around the edges, too. Groups of people were drawn by the merest hope of something to break the interminable sameness of their non-existence. This tremulous wave of humanity had, however, washed ashore some productive jetsam.