Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  It wasn’t as though she’d invented the concept for herself, either. She had discovered it during her mortal time on Earth. She had been arrested twice during her earthly sojourn; once in Bakersfield, California, for disturbing the peace, and once in Louisville, Kentucky, for lewd vagrancy. Each incarceration had been the unfortunate climax of a protracted debauch with the local Victrola cowboys. Whenever she managed to dislodge Aimee from the body for a few days, the sheer relief was more than enough to send her on a full-bore, gin-on-the-rocks razzle, and on this pair of occasions the razzle had waxed rowdy enough to attract the heat. The prisoner never wins, she learned that in those jails, and Semple could only conclude that all prisons operated in much the same manner on either side of the veil.

  She had, however, observed that nothing operated very well in the Necropolis City Jail, and this gave her hope that she’d eventually be able to organize her way out. She had organized her way out before, in both Bakersfield and Louisville. The first time, in Bakersfield, she had initially thrown conscious control back to Aimee, but Aimee had proved totally useless. Her sibling had become so horrified by the experience of waking in a filthy drunk tank surrounded by prostitutes, shoplifters, and madwomen that she’d been effectively paralyzed. Semple had been forced to resume control and deal with it. In Kentucky, she hadn’t bothered to rouse Aimee, she’d simply gone ahead and coped. Of course, she’d had the not insubstantial cash resource of the Aimee Semple McPherson Ministry, Inc., at her disposal and found that cash made freedom reasonably accessible. All she had in Necropolis was wit, sex, and intelligence. On the other hand, in Bakersfield and Louisville she had to worry about keeping the entire incident hushed up. All she wanted here was out. They could write her up in the fucking Necropolis tabloid press and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t even be able to read it.

  On each of the two occasions she’d been busted on Earth, she’d had the advantage of being emotionally buffered by a considerable quantity of alcohol. In Necropolis, she was without any such comfort cushion. When she was first brought in by the two helmet-head cops, she had been in a state of nervous disorientation. She had tried to calm herself, but her surroundings had rushed by her like an unreal and threatening blur, moving too fast for reflection or even a deep breath. As time passed, however, human adaptability kicked in, and when she was neither murdered nor gang-raped she began to regain her objectivity. Now, as she faced the guard behind the protective glass of the booth, she was able to look at the situation with almost dispassionate detachment.

  She lifted up her cuffed wrist with the slow zombie resignation that was considered appropriate inmate behavior. A steel ID tag, stamped with a row of unreadable hieroglyphics, dangled from the narrow canvas strap that had been locked around her right wrist when she’d first been brought in. This tag was the key to her existence in the system. In many respects, it counted for more than her physical body. A second, similar band had also been locked around her left wrist, but that one carried no tag. All of the prisoners wore these wristbands. They seemed to serve a double purpose. They dog-tagged the inmates’ identity and they could be hooked together by their metal clasps, like instant manacles, whenever the guards decided that hands and arms needed to be immobilized. Right at that moment her hands were free, though, and she moved her wrist slightly so the ID tag swung like a hypnotist’s pendulum in front of the guard in the booth.

  “This is all they gave me.”

  The guard creaked around in her swivel chair and peered balefully at the postcard-sized monochrome screen of her pneumatic computer. “The tag has to be cross-indexed with your personal barcode before I can allow you to pass. That’s regulations.”

  Semple sighed. She had been through this seemingly insurmountable paradox some six or seven times already. The jailhouse computers had no provision in their programming for an inmate with no barcode, and the human guards that tended them were apparently incapable of improvisation or intelligent flexibility. Each time the matter came up, the exchange quickly turned into a seemingly infinite loop. It would begin with Semple stating the obvious. “I already told you, I don’t have a barcode. I wouldn’t be here if I had a barcode. That was why I was arrested in the first place. Because I didn’t have a barcode.”

  The guard would then take the position that the obvious was impossible. “You have to have a barcode. If your inmate ID can’t be cross-indexed with a barcode, the computer won’t issue the paperwork, and if I don’t have the paperwork, I can’t clear your transfer.”

  “So don’t clear my transfer. I don’t care. Send me back to the lockup. It’s all the same to me.” Semple might have been biding her time, and handling the absurdities of the Necropolis bureaucracy with absolute passivity, but every now and then she allowed herself a slight exasperated edge. Small rebellions were vital to the retention of sanity.

  The guard shook her head. “I can’t readmit you to population. Your transfer’s on the computer.”

  “So what do we do? Am I supposed to stand here, holding up the line for the rest of time? Maybe you should just let me go, then I won’t be fouling up the system.”

  Semple realized that this time she might have gone a little too far. The guard’s eyes narrowed dangerously, enough for hairline cracks to appear in her makeup. The woman wore the same daubed-on cosmetics as everyone else in Necropolis, except, of course, the inmates of its prisons, who were deprived of everything save the pair of wristbands and a short cotton kilt, stamped with the winged ankh symbol of Anubis. This particular guard was by far the ugliest that Semple had encountered since the start of her incarceration. Her Cleopatra paint job was so thick and clumsily applied that it turned her already near-bestial features into the face of a malignant and threatening clown. “Porcine” was not a word that Semple used too frequently, but in this woman’s case it was too apt to pass over.

  The guard weighed easily four hundred pounds, and Semple judged that she couldn’t have stood more than five feet two in her sandaled feet. She had also, for some reason Semple didn’t care to imagine, completely shaved her head. The naked skull added an edge of perverse brutality to the mountainous flab, but in Semple’s estimation the most charmless features were the woman’s vast and pendulous breasts. For someone so grossly overweight, the universal Necropolis fashion of going topless was grotesquely unsuitable, and her tits hung well past the waistband of her uniform skirt. Where most of the inhabitants of Necropolis had smooth olive skin, the guard’s was pig-pink and blotchy, mottled with pimples and areas of chicken flesh. Semple could only assume that she was either some obese and unhappy construct or the result of an unfortunate misfire in the re-creation process.

  The guard turned back to the computer, clearly blaming Semple for the screwup. “Wait.”

  And Semple, having positively no other choice in the matter, waited, as did the eleven other women in her transfer batch. The huge guard pecked slowly at the keyboard with two uncertain index fingers. With a computer that ran on hieroglyphics, the keyboard was massive, with a hundred or more keys, like some strange, multi-tiered Johann Sebastian Bach organ.

  While the guard tried to come up with a workable solution, Semple looked up and down the long corridor in which she now seemed to be trapped. The corridor was dead straight and appeared to go on forever. It was somewhat wider at the floor than at the ceiling, and its walls were constructed from huge blocks of precision-hewn sandstone. The overall impression was one of being deep in the heart of a great stone pyramid. Every fifty feet or so, the corridor was sectioned off by steel-barred gates, presumably to present an obstacle to a fermenting riot or an attempt at mass breakout. The gates, like all the other metal surfaces in the jail, were painted a dull sandy beige, the color of Rommel’s tanks in the World War II desert. The gates were also automatic, controlled by guards in glassed-in booths positioned at every third set of gates, identical to the one at which Semple was currently receiving bureaucratic grief. On either side of the corridor were lines of sliding grids, the entra
nces to the tanks, the big gloomy rooms, each with its two dozen triple-tiered bunk beds, that housed all of the overcapacity inmate population, except for the incorrigible in solitary, the demented in the padded rooms, and the ultraprivileged who, having fallen foul of the Code of Anubis, were rumored to be held in luxurious private detention suites somewhere on the upper levels.

  The guards who had come to fetch Semple and the others from their tank had blanked all questions regarding their destination or the purpose of the excursion. They had simply summoned them to the sliding door and ordered them out. Initially, Semple had been terrified. The fear that she’d experienced in the immediate aftermath of her arrest had returned with a vengeance. The possibility of summary execution without trial and a dozen other kindred horrors and atrocities shrieked through her imagination. Then, in the moment of confusion as the women were being filtered from the tank, a whisper had gone around that they were being sent to Fat Ari.

  Semple had no idea who or what Fat Ari might be, but since none of the other women had showed any marked dismay at the prospect, Semple had joined the line with only a measured trepidation. Also, every one of the women selected was both young and attractive, and that gave Semple some kind of idea about the nature of Fat Ari and why they were being brought to him. If the fate of this batch of twelve was to be some kind of sexual exploitation, perhaps it would offer the window of opportunity for which she was so patiently waiting. Semple knew well how sexual desire, even among those in authority, could derail both sense and sensibility.

  After leaving the holding tank, the twelve women had moved in single file along the punctuated corridor, with one guard leading them and a second bringing up the rear. Both were considerably thinner and more limber than the fat guard in the glass booth, and both carried a short cylinder of transparent Lucite that delivered a painful, nonlethal shock much in the manner of a cattle prod. These were the guards’ only weapon, and if the twelve women had attempted a sudden rush on their escorts, they would have had little trouble overpowering them.

  No such thing happened, though, and Semple could only wonder at the docility of her fellow inmates. Without exception they passively accepted their penitent status and submitted to everything they were told without rebellion and rancor and, most surprising of all, with a minimum of complaint. Semple was starting to wonder if the prison population in Necropolis were not real criminals at all, nothing more than animated set dressing like Aimee’s cherubs and angels.

  Her developing theory was that the majority of the city’s inhabitants were fabricated beings with little or no will of their own, created for the amusement of Anubis or one of his underlings. It was possible that the whole prison system, and perhaps even the oppressive police force, had been established, not in response to any real problem of crime and punishment, but simply because someone on the planning level thought a city wasn’t complete without such things, and installed them much in the same way that a small boy with an obsessive hobby might add a new section to his model train layout.

  Had Semple been more diligent in keeping up with the trends in popular mortal, she would have known that the environment she now occupied was little more than a local modification to the genre of low-budget women’s prison movies with titles like Caged Rage and Chained Heat. The ever-present Egyptian motif and the heavy overlay of unworkable totalitarian baroque might have thrown her off track, but all the required details were in place, right down to the glandular guard and the coteries of butch and burly lesbians who ogled her body with a masculine candor.

  Even though she’d missed the cultural origins of her situation, Semple was beginning to realize that, although Anubis may have been responsible for the overall concept of Necropolis, a lot of the details must have been delegated to subsidiary minds, allowing them to indulge their own fantasies and fixations. He had, in fact, done what Aimee was hoping to do: recruited the newly deceased to help construct his hereafter. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that Necropolis was a conspiracy of the deformed. Anubis might have been its guiding force, but this all must have been the produce of a legion of warped minds.

  The line of twelve women and two guards had moved smoothly down the corridor until Semple had attempted to check through the gate at the first glass booth, when the fat guard had brought it to a shuffling halt. The prisoners looked on with boredom as Semple paralyzed the process with her lack of a barcode. The guard bringing up the rear was less patient. “So what’s the goddamned holdup?”

  The fat guard didn’t answer, but she did seem ready to enlist some outside help. She resentfully tapped out a sequence on the oversized keyboard, and a pinched irritated face appeared on the tiny computer screen. Semple assumed it was the obese guard’s immediate superior, some harried, middle-echelon administrator. A tinny voice crackled from a speaker. “Can we make this fast? I really don’t have the time to be dealing with complications at every damned section gate.”

  “I have a female unit here with no barcode.”

  The man’s mouth became a small, sour line. “You bothered me with that?”

  The guard didn’t seem too impressed by the man’s exasperation. “The box wouldn’t pass the paperwork. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You couldn’t run up the help manual?”

  “I haven’t been able to access help since before Lotus Day.”

  “You called maintenance?”

  “Sure I called pigging maintenance. I’m still waiting.”

  The administrator frowned. “Isn’t this batch for Fat Ari?”

  The guard was becoming decidedly peevish. “Of course this batch is for Fat Ari. That’s why I’ve got to have the pigging paperwork straight.”

  “It could bollix up the entire term-end profit-share bonus.”

  The fat guard’s peevishness sharpened. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “So run it on a Gazelle/Leopard ten seventy.”

  “Why didn’t you say that in first place?”

  A weary scowl twisted the man’s face. “I still cling to the archaic notion that people should know how to do their own pigging jobs.”

  The face vanished and the tiny screen snowed out. The guard hit more keys, the terminal wheezed, and about nine inches of punched paper tape extruded from a slot in the computer. The guard ripped off the tape and dropped it into a file basket, then glared at Semple. “Get on through, unit. You keep Fat Ari waiting and you’ll find out what pigging trouble’s really about.”

  The twelve women were now on the move again. Either the fat guard or the administrator had instructed the booths ahead how to process the woman with no barcode, or maybe the guards in these booths were more on the ball than their overweight colleague. Whatever the reason, the line passed three more checkpoints without any further trouble. After the third, things began to change. The rumble of deeply buried machinery was clearly audible and a smell of ozone overwhelmed the ammonia in the air. A couple of the women looked a little anxious, but Semple had an idea what was coming next. The corridor came to an end in an open space that led in turn to a much larger circular tunnel, the floor of which was a motorized walkway, a conveyor band that could move large numbers of people at something like twice the speed of a fast walk. Anubis was just the kind for Heinlein rolling roads. They were big favorites in the environments of many a control-obsessed paranoid megalo. The herding gene turned techno. Semple had seen other examples in the tangential communication that passed for Better Homes & Gardens in the Afterlife.

  The women prisoners were temporarily halted in the open space while their escort produced a long length of light steel chain and shackled them to it by the straps on their left wrists, spacing them at intervals of about two feet. When the string was complete, they were moved toward the walkway itself. The area where riders actually stepped onto the moving walkway was dotted with signs, presumably the kind of regulations and instructions to passengers that the managers of transit systems everywhere are unable to resist. She noticed
that the hieroglyphics on the signs had been defaced by amateur and universally obscene embellishments that paid particular regard to the genitalia of the various gods, humans, animals, and birds that made up the alphabet.

  Actually stepping onto the moving walkway required a certain degree of skill and judgment, but Semple, by visualizing the effects in advance, accomplished the trick with ease and grace. The woman behind her, on the other hand, misjudged the necessary matching of pace and stumbled. Semple quickly grasped her arm to prevent her from falling and bringing down the whole string. The woman nervously smiled her thanks. She glanced around to see if the guards were looking in their direction and, discovering them otherwise occupied, whispered quickly to Semple. “I guess this pretty much settles it.

  Semple didn’t understand. “What settles what?”

  “It’s Fat Ari’s for us.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  Now the woman looked as though she didn’t understand. “It is what it is. It’s Fat Ari’s.”

  “I don’t know what Fat Ari’s is. I’m an outlander.”

  “You mean you’ve never seen it on the telly?”

  “Never seen what on the telly?”

  The other prisoner spoke as though she were stating the obvious. “Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”

  The hatch closed, the lights went out, and Jim was falling. What he thought was going to be his first alien encounter had suddenly turned into a dirty sucker punch. The rug had been literally jerked from under his feet, and someone or something was screaming at pain-threshold volume. He hoped the screaming was only the rush of air past his ears, but remembered that same extended scream a little too well, as well as falling through absolute blackness. It all said Paris, as though somehow his passing had been recorded on the magstrip of time. If he was dying all over again, it hardly seemed fair. Although he knew it was both naive and illogical, he had pretty much expected the aliens to be pleased to see him. After all the LSD he had taken during his life, all the Erich VonDaeniken books and magazine articles on the paranormal that he’d consumed, after all the times that he’d seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, all the episodes of Star Trek he’d soaked up in idle beer-drunk hotel afternoons, he felt he was definitely ready for the ETs, and he had imagined that, even if they didn’t greet him with open arms, they’d at least be ready for him. The last thing he’d expected was that they’d drop him into a goddamned black hole, and maybe even kill him all over again. To go back to the pods at this juncture was a thoroughly disgusting and depressing prospect.