by Mick Farren
“The naked harlot is a trap for the ungodly.”
“The naked harlot is set here as a trap for those who might linger wistfully on the sins of the flesh.”
The ugliness of the tone was one Semple knew well from her life on Earth. She was surfacing among the viciously righteous.
“We must cast her from us.”
Aimee’s people, not hers.
“Let her be driven out and eaten by dogs.”
The frying pan was once again tilting into the fire.
“Stone the whore!”
“In the name of the Lord, stone the whore!”
“So are we there yet?”
Jim and Doc had now been drinking for what Jim subjectively conceived of as the entire long afternoon. He was well past his initial elation at being reunited with Holliday and at being rescued from the Jurassic. Bourbon shots with beer chasers had put Jim into a disgruntled discontent. His past was as fragmented as a surrealist quilt and his future looked to promise little more than prolonged degeneration and perversity. Like every drunk knew but usually forgot, introspection and booze never mixed well.
“So how soon do we get where we’re going?”
Doc had declined to answer Jim’s first Bart Simpson challenge, recognizing it as mere alcoholic petulance. When Jim asked a second time, Doc stared at him coldly; he, too, was reflective and grumpy from his own share of onboard drinking. “If you’re going to get fractious and start whining before you’ve even finished your first bottle, I might start to surmise that maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea for me to haul your sorry ass out of the mire back there.”
Jim’s face hardened. “I thought you did it because you owed me.”
Doc’s expression didn’t change, except for his left eye, which took on a dangerous glint. “I didn’t have to volunteer to pay the debt quite so freely, though, did I?”
Jim hadn’t drunk so much that he failed to realize he was drawing close to the line. He was being unreasonable, and maybe a little ill-mannered, and a half-drunk Doc Holliday was hardly the kind of man with whom one copped attitudes. Jim shrugged. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just kinda wondering how long we’re going be on the river.”
“You ought to know by now, kid. All time is relative.”
The boat journey, which Jim was starting to view as an extended and now largely unwanted Disneyland ride, was getting tired. He’d already seen plenty of water in the swamp, and he was more than ready for some hot nights, and at least the illusion of being in a big city. His outlandish encounter with the alien creations Epiphany and Devora was far enough behind him to start him thinking about women. Images of women in the sexual abstract, long legs, flashing eyes, ruby lips, swaying hips, curly pubic hair, high-heeled shoes, cries and whispers, and revealing, although not yet specified, costumes—all flickered beckoningly at the peripheries of his mind, eager to lead him to the edge of that old-fashioned temptation and the urge to be elsewhere. He couldn’t believe that Doc, from what he knew of him, wasn’t feeling the same way, too.
It didn’t help that the river had taken a decided turn for the depressing. The broccoli-colored jungle had been left far behind; now they were traveling in a corrupted Arizona, between tall, hollowly echoing cliffs of unhealthy sponge-yellow sandstone. In the shallows the water ran so thick with that silt that it gave these margins the look of diseased urine. Most of the animal life seemed to have gone, except for the buzzards and ravens that constantly circled overhead and, in the few patches of comparatively clear water, the swift outline of large, sinister fish. Here and there, on the river bottom, Jim could make out what looked to be masses of large orange spheres, angry and misshapen balloons, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze-in-a-tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Jim could only suppose they were egg sacs, laid, or maybe spawned, by some toadlike river life he had no desire to meet, undesirable and very large.
Jim’s overall impression was that the higher they moved on the river, the less benign its aspect. As if to make this perfectly clear, a galley straight out of Ben Hur had labored past them a little earlier, complete with sweating, groaning slaves, whip-wielding overseers, a relentless and muscular drummer, an aroma of shit and misery, and an obese, toga-clad Nero figure lounging on the quarterdeck with body-slaves peeling grapes for him. Where in its first, jungle-fringed reaches the Styx had been close to idyllic, it was now turning blighted and grim. Doc had stared at the wretched fantasy trireme as it creaked past, but had not felt moved to comment. Both he and Jim were lapsing into long bouts of silence.
For Jim, real confirmation of the downhill slide arrived when the launch passed the huge tail fin of a downed B-52, sticking up from a roughly cylindrical tangle of submerged and rusting wreckage. The huge jet appeared to have crashed, long ago, halfway up the cliff wall and then dropped, smashing down in what must have been a spectacular impact at the water’s edge. What Jim couldn’t figure was how any pilot would have been able to pull off such a maneuver. The old nuclear bomber would have needed the performance vectors of a UFO to make it down into a canyon that, at its narrowest point, was only slightly wider than the plane’s wingspan. The presence of a B-52, though, was enough of an uncomfortable memory, straight out of Vietnam, to make Jim lose any remaining enthusiasm for aimlessly rolling on the river.
Even the weather was taking a turn for the negative. In the shadowy places, where the sandstone walls rose to a hundred feet or more, the river grew chilly and a dank veil of cheap Bela Lugosi fog shrouded the water. What little sky was visible had darkened from blue to an implacable slate gray, and then became increasingly obscured by ominous near-black clouds.
“Are those rain clouds?”
“Smoke.”
“Smoke?”
“Smoke from Gehenna.”
Jim straightened up. “Gehenna?” He rose from the seat cushions in the stern of the launch and lurched toward the bow. “I have to see this.”
Doc was taking his turn at the helm, making him once again irritable. “It’s quite a sight, I promise you that.”
Jim looked up at the dark clouds overhead. “It is smoke.”
“That’s what I told you.”
“How soon till we see Gehenna itself?”
“You want to take the wheel for a spell?
Jim nodded. He knew it was the least he could do if he wanted to get back into Holliday’s good graces. “Sure.”
The two men changed places and Doc sagged back into the cushions, reaching for a drink. “Just take us around the curve nice and easy, and for fuck’s sake don’t go running us into an oil rig or something else up there in the mist.”
“Oil rigs?”
“I don’t know. They look like oil rigs. Big metallic shit, planted on legs on the middle of the river. God only knows what folks do on ’em.” Doc scowled. “All I know is we don’t want to be stuck anywhere in the immediate vicinity of that smoking garbage dump they call Gehenna. Hell no. That’s something we can absolutely do without. You read me?”
“I read you.”
“And while you’re at it, try not to hit any mines.”
“Mines?”
Doc ignored Jim’s expression of surprise and concern. “You sure you’re not too drunk to be doing that?”
Jim quickly shook his head. He wanted to know about the mines. “There are mines on the Styx?”
Doc made a dismissive gesture. “On this stretch? No. Not too many, and most of them are back down near the swamps and on into the delta. Leftovers from the Barbiturate Wars. But you do see one bobbing past every now and again. Let me know it you spot one.”
Jim took a deep breath. “Don’t worry. I will.”
The prospect of mines proved to be a highly sobering one. Jim was suddenly seeing single again, taking deep gulps of river air and giving all his attention to the navigation of the launch. It never ceased to amaze him how, since his death, some things had become so much easier. It was possible, if need be, to come out of the effect of intoxica
nts almost with a snap of the fingers. Of course, other things had grown nearly impossible. The writing of poetry was a case in point; Jim had reached the stage of wondering if his loss of creativity was caused, in some part, by the equal loss of any need to hedge his bets against death. Did other artists lose interest, on this side of the veil, in what had previously been the driving force in their lives? It hardly seemed so. Whoever had conjured a B-52 into the bottom of a canyon had to be up for some conceptual rock and roll sculpture pranking. And then there was this Phibes, with his seagoing wedding cake. Maybe Jim would have to fess up and admit he’d simply blown himself out back lifeside.
Blown out or not, self-deluded or not, this wasn’t the time to be thinking about it. Following the curve of the river was a little harder than Doc Holliday had made it seem. High formidable cliffs loomed on either side of the narrowest channel they had yet encountered. The Styx had carved deep into the landscape, producing cliff walls with high curved overhangs, and ran fast and choppy, creating small white wavelets as it went into each tight turn. The launch, although powerful, had to run hard to make headway against the stream and repeatedly bucked the flow. Jim had to use both hands to maintain control of the wheel and keep the craft on a straight course. Any serious deviation would have been treated by the river as an invitation to hurl the boat into the rock face and smash its deep varnished panels into matchwood.
“You all right up there, Jim lad?”
“Shipshape and Bristol fashion, Skipper.”
“You just keep it that way.”
“She needs a firm hand now and again.”
“Don’t they all, kid.”
“You say Gehenna’s just around the bend.”
“You just focus on the firm hand, boy. You’ll see Gehenna in all its gory glory soon enough.”
“Stone the whore!”
At first Semple was blind. The only information she was receiving was aural and tactile. She knew she had returned to her familiar body, which was of some comfort, but this was offset by the indignity of being stretched out on her back, totally without clothes, on hard stony dirt, staring straight up into a blindingly bright sun in a dangerously clear sky. She was covered by a fine layer of dust that even packed her nose, mouth, and ears, as though, in temporal reality, she had been lying there for quite some time. She also sensed that a number of people were standing over her. Presumably the ones who were talking about stoning the whore. It was possible that she wasn’t the whore in question, but she wasn’t holding out too much hope. Luck had hardly been with her on this adventure. Pain shot through the muscles of her arm as she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. She really had been lying there a long time. As her vision gradually returned, she could make out dark shapes leaning into her field of vision, peering down at her through the sundogs and colored retinal burn. They were talking about her.
“I say get her on her feet and whip her out to the badlands.”
“Stoning her would be quicker.”
“She’s right. We can’t waste any time today. The Patriarch is in a foul temper. He wants to make twenty miles by nightfall.”
One voice had a particularly snide and insinuating tone. “Maybe he’ll change his mind when he gets a look at her. A good punishment could be just the thing to improve his mood.”
As Semple’s eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the darker shapes began to assume form. Now she was looking up into a circle of faces that were as coarse, malformed, and ignorant as any that could be found in any part of even the darkest backwoods of Arkansas or Mississippi. Narrow, suspicious eyes peered down at her from under low brows and lumpy foreheads. A hand came toward her, but she ducked away from it with a snarl. “You won’t touch me if you know what’s good for you.”
The hand jerked back. Just as on Earth, Semple thought, trash was trash and you had to show it who was boss. Despite all of her disorientation and naked vulnerability, she had to take the offensive. Whatever might happen to her here, it could hardly be worse than what she had been subjected to at the hands of Anubis, Fat Ari, Mengele, and the rest. She was heartily sick of being shoehorned into a whimpering victim role. This time, she’d be damned if she was going to take it lying down, literally or otherwise. She snarled again and the circle around her backed off. The snarling routine seemed to be working, so she tried it a third time, with even more feeling, using it as a cover while she rolled over to get her hands and knees under so she could spring to her feet with a quick leap. As soon as she was on two legs, she dropped into a simian defensive crouch. She knew she probably made a scary enough sight to begin with, and she hoped that behaving like a feral thing might spook them entirely. If these fools believed she was some kind of desert djinni, some banshee she-devil, let them. Just as long as they stayed good and terrified, they’d be much less likely to start reaching for the rocks they’d seemed so gung-ho to start hurling a few moments earlier.
She turned slowly; snorting through her nose with what she hoped was sufficiently demonic ferocity. It certainly seemed to be working. The circle around her retreated another couple of paces. She continued to turn, acting every inch the cornered succubus, carefully observing all the while. The small crowd was completely composed of women, although, a short distance away, a number of men and a flock of scrawny, black-faced sheep stood staring; dealing with she-demons was women’s work. The women in question were possibly the ugliest and most depressing collection of broads she had ever encountered. Perhaps she could somehow turn this to her advantage. If these horrors were a representative sample of local womanhood, the men might well be drawn to their sheep; given the look of the men, the sheep were the ones truly getting the shitty end of the deal. And Semple knew whereof she spoke. The camp meetings they had run when she and Aimee were alive and one, starting out on the rocky road to fame and fortune in the evangelism racket, had attracted more than their fair share of the benightedly repugnant. This bunch clearly thought of themselves as the Children of Israel in a wilderness straight out of the Classics Illustrated Book of Exodus, but to her they resembled nothing more than a bunch of Ozark inbreds without even the benefit of dilapidated Ford trucks. She had managed their kind before; if they didn’t immediately turn violent, she could manage them again.
The women came in all shapes and sizes, from eating disorder blubber to rawboned and desiccated. They were all dressed in cheap, coarse, Old Testament homespun, but their faces made them look like Elvis’s educationally challenged cousins on his daddy’s side: sour, mean, and ignorant, with built-up heads of resentment that stretched back so many generations it was encoded in their DNA. One who was a little braver than the rest, a tall streak of sour vinegar, turned and faced her companions. “I say stone her now. Before she can put a hex on the lot of us.”
Semple laughed nastily. “You’re all double-hexed already. You’ll have boils all over your bodies within the hour.”
She hoped this would put the fear into them. It seemed to work on some, who stopped glaring at her and began nervously peering inside the loose caftans, in search of latent blemishes. The tall woman, however, was not one of these. Semple had miscalculated. The threat only made her more determined. “How many times do I have to tell you? Stone the abomination, whatever it is!”
The tall woman appeared to possess a certain natural authority; after only a few seconds of hesitation, a majority of the others were bending down, reaching for rocks, pleased that someone was doing their thinking for them, and that the thinking involved direct and easy action. They started moving back, widening the circle so they wouldn’t hit each other when the boulders commenced to fly. This wasn’t going Semple’s way. Trying somehow to crack this reality, Semple looked around wildly, but she knew it was impossible. Dull, fearful, and brutish they might be, but there were too many women gathered in this place for her to erase them with her mind. They didn’t even need the sheep’s help to keep this bit of stinking desert intact. She didn’t want to believe she was going to be stoned back to the
Great Double Helix by a bunch of primitive hick herdspersons, but it sure looked that way. If worse came to worst, was there any way to avoid the pain? She had to find an answer, and soon. The women were already winding up to throw. But then, miraculously, the cavalry charged to the rescue. There came an impossibly deep and booming voice: “AND WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE LORD IS GOING ON HERE?”
The voice resonated with fundamentalist and wholly phony electronic bass reverb. A new player had entered the auditorium. The women dropped their rocks, panic-stricken. As one they raised their right arms and signed an invisible circle in the air, hands arranged with index and middle finger extended, much in the same manner as a Pope blessing the multitude. Later Semple would find out that this was the so-called Sign of the Eternal Continuation, with which the followers of the Patriarch were expected to pay tribute to their leader. In other parts, she would also learn, it was known as the Universal Sign of the Donut. This new player was close to seven feet tall, with wild white hair, flowing robes, the beard of a prophet, and a carved wooden staff in his right hand. He’d had the good grace not to make himself look exactly like Charlton Heston, but he wasn’t far off. Semple knew this had to be the Patriarch. Before she’d agreed to go on Aimee’s fool’s errand, she’d been aware that some damn silly demented Moses was on the loose in the wilds, pretending to look for the Promised Land with a bunch of retard followers. She heard he staged orgies just so he could get his kicks smiting the sinners. If this wasn’t he, it had to be another exactly like him.
The Patriarch acknowledged the women’s salute with a curt motion of the staff and repeated his demand. “I ASKED YOU, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?”
The women avoided his eyes; not even the tall one managed to muster the courage to answer, so Semple, deciding she really had nothing to lose, placed both hands on her hips and adopted a pose of nude, if dusty, defiance. “This bunch of weary, sheep-cuckolded hags was trying to get up the nerve to stone me to death.”
