by Mick Farren
“You wouldn’t have preferred the Dream Warden?”
She smiled nicely. “How could anything be preferable to being noticed by you, my lord?”
Anubis had then switched position like a spoiled child. “Are you saying that you have something against our Dream Warden? That you’re maybe too good for him?”
Semple sighed inwardly. Don’t you ever give it a rest, Benji? “How can I say, my lord? All I’ve seen is a figure in a robe.”
“And you don’t want to see what’s beneath that robe, believe us. It’s disgusting.”
Semple couldn’t let this pass. She decided the highest level of reproach that she could risk would be to pout prettily. “And you were going to give me to him, my lord?”
“But we didn’t, did we? If we were you, we’d be thinking about original ways in which we could express our gratitude.”
Anubis’s private suite ran to some twenty rooms, each of which apparently came with its own complement of handmaidens and Nubian guards. Anubis, however, showed no inclination to treat Semple to a tour of his private turf. Instead he marched straight for what turned out to be the master bedroom, although the very word “bedroom” was hardly adequate. The place was the size of a small ballroom and the bed could have accommodated ten or more, and probably had. The color scheme was a bruised midnight purple that Anubis probably thought was decadent and erotic, but struck Semple as simply nightshade poisonous. Multiple mirrors were arranged in such a way that, from almost any point in the room, it was possible to see infinitely repeating images of oneself. A flickering, flashing, almost psychedelic lighting pattern confused and flattered these reflections, created moving pools of deep shadow and complex refraction patterns, while industrial-strength incense censers belched clouds of perfumed smoke. The mirrors had momentarily taken Semple by surprise. She hadn’t thought of Anubis as so overtly narcissistic, but it made sense. The dog-god’s boudoir was a place of smoke and mirrors, darkness and deception, and pretty much what she’d expected of her host and putative owner.
A large pyramid-shaped television set was placed so it could be easily observed from the bed. Anubis’s first move on entering the bedroom was to go straight to it and turn it on. Semple moved slightly so she could see the triangular picture. On the screen, a parade of naked women with fixed smiles desperately swayed and jiggled down a narrow catwalk. It had to be Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club—unless, of course, Fat Afi had competition. Before Semple could observe any more of the show, Anubis switched the channel. The screen now showed the God-King himself engaged in athletic, canine-style coitus with a moaning blonde, while a second, red-haired woman with a freckled back lay beside them, assisting him and his primary companion in any way she could. Was Anubis so far gone that he had to have sex to the accompaniment of a visual record of a previous triumph?
Anubis waved his hand abstractedly in Semple’s direction. “Remove your garments.”
Yeah, and peel me a grape, you son of a bitch. You could at least look interested. Hiding her contempt, she engaged a neutral smile. “Anything you say, my lord.”
Stripping in a place where the bulk of the population went topless was hardly a big thing. She certainly didn’t feel like treating Anubis to any kind of bump-and-grind routine and, anyway, he seemed more interested in his homemade porno tapes. On the triangular screen, the moaning blonde was either enjoying the orgasm of her life or creating an Oscar-winning simulation. Her piece de resistance was to run up a near-perfect vocal scale in high C, only to blow the effect by going flat on the highest top note. With all the aloof elegance she could muster, Semple sighed discreetly to regain the dog-god’s attention and let the hawk-wing cape drop from her shoulders. A single tug loosened the wraparound skirt and it joined the cape on the floor at her feet.
“My lord?”
Anubis inspected her nudity and nodded with what she interpreted as grudging approval. At the same time he let his own kilt fall to the floor and Semple could hardly believe what she was seeing. It reminded her of the ancient adage of a baby’s arm holding an apple in its fist, except it was a deep mahogany, gnarled like the trunk of a vine, with long twisting veins standing out in clear relief. At first she thought that it must have been a put-on, an elaborate showboat codpiece, a strapped-on construct of wishful thinking. Only when it started to move did she realized that this was wishful thinking made fantasy flesh. Anubis again eyeballed her nudity, then looked down at himself and grinned like a proud Doberman. “Does it frighten you?”
Had Semple been terrified out of her mind, she would never have admitted it. Since he so plainly intended to fuck her, she did have a certain trepidation about being able to accommodate the thing without too much physical modification to her own body, but she had quickly buried that, approaching the experience with a kind of academic curiosity. Conducting herself as a connoisseur of the extremes in experience was infinitely better than tearing her hair and rolling her eyes like a degraded slave.
She deliberately arched an eyebrow. “Your . . . manhood is truly magnificent, my lord. I have never seen anything like it.”
Anubis smiled smugly. “I very much doubt that you have.”
Anubis beckoned to her, and Semple steeled herself with deliberately dark thoughts. Hold on, Fido. Semple McPherson’s day will come. She was now bent on not only escaping from Necropolis, but also putting the hurt on Anubis before she went. She didn’t particularly care how she hurt him—physically, emotionally, materially, spiritually, it was neither here nor there. She just wanted to hurt him where it hurt.
The desire intensified as the dog-god crooked an imperious finger. “Come here and kneel in front of me.”
She had assumed that he’d be content to simply stick it in her and have done with it. She now realized she was expected to fondle and play with the monstrosity. It was becoming clearer and clearer that, in Necropolis, on all levels, absolutely nothing came easy.
Jim groaned and closed his eyes. He didn’t want it ever to stop. He didn’t care that it was all alien illusion. He didn’t care what the aliens might be doing to him in reality. Reality had never been this good to him. He could cruise all the way to infinity locked in this custom fantasy. Epiphany’s thighs gripped him, encircled him, held him fast, while a hundred hands with a thousand fingers seemed to move over his body, and even caress his very nervous system.
“Epiphany, don’t stop.”
Her voice breathed inside his head. “Don’t worry, baby. I won’t stop until you beg me.”
It was only moments earlier that Epiphany’s hands, the same hands that were now driving Jim to the edge of insanity, had gone seductively to the silver ring fastening of her bubble space helmet.
“I’m going to have fun with you, Jim Morrison.”
One turn had detached the helmet, a second turn had caused the hard shell torso section simply to disappear. Jim didn’t know how she pulled the trick of the disappearing space suit, and she didn’t give him any time to puzzle over it. She was standing in front of him in long boots, long gloves, and nothing else, demanding and getting his total attention. Slowly and suggestively she pulled off the gloves. “Oh yes, I’m going to have a great deal of fun with you, Jim Morrison. Do you think you can handle all the fun I’m going to have with you?”
It scarcely worried him when he noticed that Devora had made no attempt to divest herself of any part of her suit. Jim was now beyond caring. So Devora wanted to play the voyeur? So what? Wasn’t Epiphany promising him the stars?
“Stars like you never imagined, baby.”
Together they had sunk down onto the surface of the blue Jetson ovoid, and sensual delirium had immediately overtaken Jim. It was only as he went down for the last time that he saw that Devora had unholstered the phallic art deco ray gun and was applying a clear lubricant gel to the barrel. By then, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Semple groaned and closed her eyes. She wanted it to stop. She’d had it with the infinite reflections of herself, s
pread-eagled under the weight of the dog-headed god. She’d had enough of Anubis slamming into her with his absurd oversized penis. She was tired of his lapping her breasts with his rough dog tongue, and worst of all, she was tired of being expected to moan appreciative clichés to make the idiot feel omnipotent. “Oh my lord, it’s so big, it hurts, it hurts so much, please, it feels like it’s going to split me in half. Oh, my lord! It’s hurting me, but don’t stop, please don’t stop . . . ”
At first she had managed to hold gagging revulsion at bay by disengaging from her physicality, distancing herself first from what she was expected to do and then, as things progressed, from what was being done to her. From this point of view the cavernous purple bedroom with its drifting layers of scented smoke, the picture of the powerful and rapacious dog-headed creature crouched over the prone white body, positioning and repositioning it as it gasped and groaned beneath him, had a certain Pre-Raphaelite pornographic charm. Her undoing came when, in that state of detachment, she had perversely started to enjoy herself. The moment she gave in, she was reminded what a sick piece of slime Anubis really was; repulsion had elbowed its way in, detachment had taken a cab.
But then, just as she started to reached the limits of her tolerance, something new began to happen.
Something new began to happen. Jim’s senses were already in serious disarray. Epiphany was somehow simultaneously all around him, under him, above him, and front of him, a Mobius continuation, the galaxy made rhythmic flesh. The blue ovoid room came and went. Forward and back, the two of them in sync to the erotic pulse-of-the-spheres. One moment the room, the next a state of free fall above the methane and ammonia atmosphere of Saturn. The rings arched over them and left them gasping in the vacuum, reality capriciously disengaged. The only constants were that Devora, still in her midnight-blue space suit, was always behind him, at the periphery of his distorted vision, and that some foreign object had penetrated his body. And yet, the intrusion in no way bothered him. Quite the contrary, it only added to the mind-thrashing fun he was already having with Epiphany. If his unexpected paramour’s companion wanted to bugger him with the lubricated chrome of her ray gun, who was he to complain?
When the flash came from out of nowhere and almost blinded him, Jim was concerned that Devora, in some moment of cold alien excitation, had inadvertently—or maybe even deliberately (a little mantis in everyone)—pulled the trigger on the ray gun. He was still conscious enough to know that could mean trouble. Jim felt as if his spine were going to snap, his brain boil out through his eyes. He was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, he was in another place.
Semple felt as though her spine were going to snap, her brain boil out through her eyes. She was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, she was in another place, with another person, a man, indistinct but definitely a man. His hair was shoulder-length and dark, but his features kept shifting, like the indefinable face in an elusive dream. And they were together, with a power passing between them though neither of them knew why.
Jim was in the arms of the Queen of the Nile, black ringleted hair billowing around him, kohl-rimmed eyes gazed into his. She gripped him with a terrible urgency, as though she knew they had encountered each other in a transitory place that could only be the result of a glitch in the cosmic flow; in a nanosecond, he knew they would be parted. She pressed her mouth against his in simultaneous welcome and farewell. Then Jim was falling. Multiple orgasms of a kind that he had never experienced before were ripping through him. And he was once again falling.
Semple was screaming. Multiple orgasms were ripping through her. And he was screaming. And she was screaming.
The question of human edibility
is a tricky one.
A is Jim hit slimy water with a splash and sank, he had a fleeting glimpse of the UFO above him. It was already nothing more than a tight cluster of colored lights in the sky, zigzagging away on an erratic and illogical course and vanishing into a gray overcast, just like they did in all the sighting stories and blurry handheld camcorder tapes. For an instant, he was filled with a burning if illogical outrage. He’d been used like the proverbial one-night stand, the universal tramp. He didn’t even qualify as an intergalactic whore: to the best of his knowledge, he’d received absolutely nothing in return for the bodily invasion except a residual burning in his rectum and the feeling that he had been victimized. As far as could tell, he’d been dropped from a chute in the underside of the saucer, dumped out like garbage, without so much as even the parting acknowledgment of metaphoric cab fare.
As he sank, his mouth, nose, and ears filled with slime, duckweed, and swamp water, and resentment gave way to the urgent necessities of survival. Jim hit bottom, or at least hit mud. He floundered up again, stumbling, splashing, drenched, with his previous fury returning. Not only had he been discarded and disrespected by the fucking aliens, but something magical had been interrupted by his fall. He didn’t even have a clear memory of what had happened. All he knew was that it had been important and now it was gone. A new and mysterious cake, not simply left out in the rain, but hit by a monsoon, the recipe irretrievable. A woman with dark Cleopatra hair hovered at the core of the fragmenting memory, but already he could no longer picture her. The drapes of perception were rapidly closing, like the falling curtains of dreamwaking.
Gasping, treading water, getting himself covered in mud, he discovered that the water in which he was struggling was actually only chest deep. At the same time he also heard a voice. “Over here, pal. There’s a few square yards of dry land where I am. I don’t know what good it’ll do you, but you’re welcome to join me.”
The voice was not unlike that of a frog in an animated cartoon. A cockney frog, to boot, with vowels decidedly British, and the kind of epicene vocal droop affected by Mick Jagger in his speaking voice. The frog, if indeed it was a frog, sounded dense but trustworthy, and for want of a better offer, Jim waded laboriously in the direction of the voice.
“Say something else, will you? So I can get my bearings?”
“Tossed from a flying saucer, were you? Give you the treatment and then heave-ho you into the swamp, did they? Those fucking aliens have a lot of fucking nerve, I’m telling you.”
Jim was now only up to his waist in water, pushing through the thick reed beds that flourished in the shallows. It was hard to see. The swamp was heavily shrouded in a gray drifting mist. The Anglo-frog seemed be leading him in the right direction, but he needed to keep it talking. “You get a lot of folks ejected from UFOs around here?”
The frog voice was blasé. “Happens all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Maybe not all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. Local speculation has it that the aliens have this thing about the Jurassic. Maybe something to do with the Nemesis Asteroid.”
Now Jim was totally confused. “The Jurassic?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re saying this is the Jurassic?”
The frog voice croaked, perhaps to clear its throat. “Or a loving reconstruction of same.”
Jim halted in his squelching tracks. “Get the fuck outta here.”
“Surprised? Most folks are when they first fall out of the UFO.”
“I’m in the Jurassic era?”
“You’re in the Jurassic.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, my old son. Plus there’s not very much you can do about it apart from trying to avoid being eaten. Bit of a difference in the old food chain back here. I can understand your confusion, though; it must be hard to go from Master of the Universe to a snack on legs.”
As if in confirmation of the point, the mist temporarily parted and a huge form became visible in the distance. It stood well over fifty feet tall, with a long serpentine neck and tail, a hunched body like a small hill, and a mud-caked hide wrinkled green and brown, with markings not unlike jungle camouflage. It stood grazing o
n the top foliage of a medium-sized tree, and even its slightest movement caused twenty inches of oily swell to roll across the swamp, threatening Jim with inundation. Jim Morrison stood frozen by the sight of his first live dinosaur. Suddenly he wished he’d never been so rash as to call himself the Lizard King. In terms of monarchy, this beast had him. Jim wasn’t sure if it was a brontosaurus or a diplodocus. He had always confused the two. The frog voice piped up helpfully. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, pal. Strictly herbivorous.”
Jim became defensive. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.”
At that moment, the creature raised its tiny head and never-ending neck to the sky and emitted a wailing but strangely harmonic cry, something between the call of the humpback whale and a mournful foghorn. It was immediately answered by similar calls from elsewhere in the swamp.
“They do like to sing of an evening.”
Even though Jim was fairly certain that the frog voice—and the human archaeologists of his own time—were correct in believing that such dinosaurs were harmless, he stood and waited for the giant beast to finish its song before resuming his struggle to dry ground. He recalled that a raging bull was also technically a herbivore, and he certainly had no idea what kind of red rag it might take to raise the ire of a diplodocus.
“Makes you nervous, does she?”
“Anything a few thousand times my size makes me nervous.”
Jim was now wading out of the swamp toward an area of coarse grass hummocks and tortured willows a few poor inches above the general water level. The mist was more patchy on this marginally higher ground, and off in the far distance he could see a dense plume of smoke rising from what he took to be an active volcano. He really did seem to be in some young Jurassic world. He looked around for the source of the frog voice, but could see nothing that qualified. “So where are you, friend?”
