by Mick Farren
The Patriarch slowly looked her up and down. Although he maintained a pose of righteous outrage, Semple saw something else in his eyes that was far from righteous and all too familiar. The son of a bitch was as horny as the next guy. Maybe hornier. As Patriarch, he was probably above seeking the comfort of sheep. Catching on, she posed like a cheap pinup. “You must be this Moses character I’ve been hearing about.”
“INDEED I AM MOSES, THE PROPHET OF THE LORD THY GOD, AND WHAT MANNER OF NAKED ABOMINATION ARE YOU?” Without waiting for an answer, Moses waved an arm in the direction of the now-silent women. “BRING LINEN TO COVER THIS THING!”
A short, fat woman hurried away and quickly returned with a rough, homespun caftan like the ones she and the others were wearing. She seemed frightened to approach Semple; only when Moses glared at her did she dare to step forward, eyes averted, to hand the garment over. Semple snatched it from her, as though impatient with all the fear and hesitation. It was probably the ugliest piece of apparel that Semple had ever been expected to wear, and before putting it on, she inspected it slowly and carefully. Although the same dun color as the desert, it seemed reasonably clean and free of lice, so finally she slipped it over her head and turned around as though modeling the thing for Moses. “Is that better? You’d rather have me clothed and shapeless?”
Moses seemed a little unnerved by Semple’s pirouette, but covered himself by roaring even louder, “I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”
Semple was determined not to be intimidated by Moses’ crude bombast. She’d heard enough voice-amplification tricks in the court of Anubis not to be blown away by this fool’s bass boost and slap-back echo. She stood her ground and inspected the Patriarch with an expression that verged on insolence. “Is this how you treat an unfortunate traveler who has fallen to misfortune in the wilderness?”
Clearly Moses wasn’t accustomed to being addressed in this manner. Most of his followers were probably too dumb and brainwashed to speak unless spoken to directly. “I DEMAND TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”
“You think you might lower the volume a little? I really find it very hard to conduct any kind of conversation under these circumstances. And while we’re at it, if someone doesn’t offer me some water, I’m liable to die of thirst and dehydration before you find out anything about me at all. I always assumed the giving of water, even to a stranger, was common courtesy among all desert peoples, no matter how primitive.”
This gave Moses the easy out of barking another order. “FETCH HER WATER!”
Semple now knew she had the measure of this biblical blowhard. He didn’t want to see her stoned any more than she did. At least not until he’d had a chance to get her on her own and see if she was up for a little patriarchal bodily tribute. And yet he seemed uncertain how to pull if off with all the women, plus the men and the sheep, watching his every move. Don’t worry, Moses my boy, she thought. I’ll give you any help you need. Just get me away from these potential rock throwers.
This time a different woman waddled quickly off to do the Patriarch’s bidding. When she returned with an earthenware pitcher, she, too, shied away from eye contact. The water tasted brackish, but it was cool and wet, and just what Semple’s parched throat gasped for. She drank slowly and with care, however. She was well aware that drinking too much, too fast under these conditions could cause all manner of physical problems, and she wasn’t about to take any chances. She also suspected that, among the Moses Family, water was strictly rationed. If so, another way by which she might assert her separateness and superiority over this badland trash presented itself. When she’d finished drinking, she poured the rest of the contents of the pitcher slowly and deliberately over her head. As she’d expected, the women let out a collective gasp at her cavalier attitude to what, for them, was a precious fluid. She ignored their response and handed the container back to the woman with a satisfied sigh. “God, that was good.”
Moses immediately rounded on her with a bellow. “YOU TAKE THE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN?”
Semple looked at Moses as though she were starting to lose patience. “Will you get off it? I know exactly what you are. And I’m not impressed by all your bellowing and bluster.”
For a moment, she thought she might have overplayed her hand. Moses looked around at his followers as though he were going to give the order to let the stoning begin all over again, but instead he merely waved an angry arm. “DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE WORK TO DO? GET ABOUT YOUR ALLOTTED TASKS AND STOP STANDING AROUND GAPING. THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO SEE HERE.”
Semple nodded to herself. Good thinking, pal. Send the common herd back to their business so we can get down to ours. As the crowd of women reluctantly moved away, he turned back to Semple. “NOW WILL YOU TELL ME WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE?”
At the sound of his voice, many of the followers stopped in their tracks and stared at the exchange. Some of the sheep bleated uneasily and Semple sighed. “It really might be an idea to lower the volume a bit. It doesn’t impress me and makes it hard to retain our privacy.”
For an instant Moses looked as though he were about to strike her down with his staff. Lust and the need to maintain authority stood conflicted. Then lust won out and he lowered the staff, at the same time killing the echo and reverb. He took a deep breath. It seemed he’d been playing the Wrath of God for so long that normal conversation was hard for him. “So what are you?”
Semple half smiled, restrainedly coquettish. “All you needed to do was ask me nicely.”
His anger started to boil again. “Who are you and what are you doing in my desert?”
“I’m just an unfortunate refugee from cannibalism and fornication.”
Moses blinked. “Are you serious?”
“I just escaped from of the city of Necropolis. You know about Necropolis ?”
“Of course I know about Necropolis.”
“And its dog-god Anubis?”
“May his name be cursed.” The response was an unthinking reaction. Moses was intrigued. Semple moved a little closer to the Patriarch, as though she wanted to confide in him. She was aware that the women were still covertly watching. “Anubis just let off one of his dirty little atom bombs, except this one was a bit bigger and more complicated than I suspect he anticipated. I’m surprised you didn’t see the flash or feel the shock.”
Moses’ face stiffened. “We saw the flash and felt the shock. The goats panicked and the herdsmen have only just finished rounding them up.”
Semple smiled knowingly and gestured to the tribe. “That must have been a hard one to explain to the faithful. They don’t look like they’re quite up to the concept of nuclear technology.”
“I told them it was Lucifer spawning demons from the lightning.”
Semple laughed and nodded. “I guess that’s close enough.”
“You’re one of Anubis’s constructs?”
“I’m nobody’s construct, pal. I was only in Necropolis because, out of the goodness of my heart, I went there on an errand for my sister.”
Moses looked at her sharply. “SISTER?”
Unintentionally, he had put the echo and reverb on at full power. Semple clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t do that!”
Moses cut them off. “I’m sorry. It’s a habit. What about your sister?”
Semple realized she might have said too much. “Nothing, she’s just a sister.”
Moses’ eyes narrowed and he shot her a sly, sideways look. “You’re not Aimee Semple McPherson, are you?”
Now it was Semple’s turn to take a deep breath. “I’m Semple McPherson. Aimee and I separated a while ago. I guess you could say we used to be in the same racket as you.”
Moses frowned, then stared speculatively a Semple. “I think we’d better take this conversation to my tent. It’s a little too public out here. I have to keep up my image in front of the rubes.”
Semple kept her face expressionless. His guard was down now and he was revealing himself for the con
artist he really was. This faux Moses could talk about rubes, but she had him as hooked as any carny mark on the midway.
His first sight of Gehenna was enough to make Jim wish that he was drunk again. Even before visual contact, the stench that wafted down the river, the stink of punishment and pain, of violated bodies, ozone, sulfuric acid and ammonia, hot blood and decaying flesh, burning hair and unidentifiable toxic pollution, was an olfactory cocktail that boded the worst kind of ill. With it came an amalgam of noise that was equally daunting: massed voices cried and lamented in a seamless howl of screams, shouting, and psychotic laughter. The human wailing was accompanied by a counterpoint of growls and barking that had to come from the throats of things so evil they could hardly qualify as animal. Underpinning it all was the deep rumble and straining grind of unholy massed machinery. And yet the sound and smell were only mild precursors of the full visual spectacle. Hieronymous Bosch was made real with a brutality that leapt quantum measures beyond any mere painting’s imagined nastiness. Those who dwelled there had come to suffer in a manner unimaginable even to one with Jim’s deviant background.
In a massive, smoke-filled crevasse carved out of the living sandstone like an axe wound in the rock made by some god or spectacular giant, creaking and straining mechanisms of suffering labored at their infinitely repeated tasks. While flames belched from fissures in the rocks, pistons rose and fell and steam leaked from huge driving engines. Revolving cam shafts and greased axles turned cogs of wood and brass and long spiral worm gears that, in their turn, caused lacerating steel blades to rise and fall and huge hammers to drive iron nails into writhing flesh. Countless victims were bound, strapped, and secured to gallows, gibbets, and structures so bizarre in the contortions they inflicted on the human frame that Jim was unable to give names to them. Long, slow-rolling conveyor belts moved the damned from one automated theater of cruelty to the next, in endless cycles of relentless automation. Huge cauldrons steamed and bubbled at a slow simmer, each filled to the brim with a foul stew on the surface of which bobbed the shrieking, sobbing heads of submerged humans. Others were crushed, over and over, by huge stone rollers, while more were continuously flogged with lashes as long as the leather traces of teamster wagons.
Although the mechanical structures presented the impression that Gehenna was a dark clockwork universe of meaningless repeating torture, it had no real precision about it. Its mechanisms strained and shuddered; elbows in its maze of pipework leaked steam and dripped boiling water and oil. Its nooks and crannies were thronged with masses of wailing humanity being subjected to less systemized acts of fiendishness. Jim watched while what was left of a man, flesh all but stripped from his bones, was dragged along a dripping, reeking catwalk over one of the cauldrons. A barbed fishhook pierced his rib cage, and the rope attached to the hook was dragged behind a blood-spattered golf cart being driven by a pair of grinning demons. Other victims were enmeshed in tumbleweed tangles of rusty razor wire, while guffawing reptile things, and other strange creatures that looked to be entirely composed of leather, laughed at their agonizingly futile efforts to free themselves.
High on the sides of the crevasse, shackled work gangs of naked, filthy men and women labored, quarrying with picks and shovels, balancing on impossibly narrow ledges or perched on rickety scaffolding, actually attempting to enlarge the valley of pain by the strain of their muscles and the sweat of their brows, while other demons and reptile creatures encouraged them with long black bullwhips. At regular intervals, a worker would lose his or her footing, slip, and fall. Either the unfortunate would be saved by those linked to him on the particular chain gang, or else all would be dragged down, plunging to the rocks and fires below, to the great merriment and amusement of the demons and reptiles in charge.
Gehenna even seemed to have developed it own unique flora and fauna. Amid the machinery and instruments of pain, huge misshapen fungoid growths reared corpse-white and unhealthy, as large as trees. Other things Jim didn’t recognize, like damaged mutant eggs with traceries of poisonous green and purple veins dappling their shells, grew out of the charred black soil between the flame gushers and fire pits, ranging in size from just a few inches to six or seven feet at their widest diameter. Huge rats and scrawny, red-eyed dogs made their own contribution to the misery of the valley’s human denizens, as was to be expected in such a nightmare landscape, like the crows, ravens, and vultures that circled overhead and settled to peck at the miserable undying carrion. The presence of the demons, reptile men, and leather creatures also conformed to a certain hellishly medieval logic. What Jim didn’t understand were the impossible bird-headed women, the bat-winged toads, the hogs with fangs and flippers, or the animated slime that constantly shaped and reshaped itself. They all seemed to have been included as nothing more than horrific additional background.
Once he had taken in enough of Gehenna, Jim turned and looked at Doc. Jaded as he might be, he still felt sickened by the entire wretched panorama of this hideous garden of delights. It bore too uncomfortable a resemblance to one of his old earthside nightmares. “Jesus Christ, talk about the horror and the horror.”
Doc smiled sourly. “You can’t go up the river without meeting it in one shape or form. Ask 01’ Joe Conrad . . . or poor Marlon Brando.”
“Every one of those dumb suffering bastards could leave if they wanted to. Right?”
“That kinda depends. If they’re only set dressing, they haven’t got a prayer; strictly speaking, though, nobody does anything they don’t subconsciously want to do. Those who went there by choice stay there by choice.”
Jim shook his head. “Too much old-time religion at an early age can just eat some folks all up.”
Doc himself was also staring into the Valley of Gehenna that was now mercifully starting to retreat astern. “A little Bible is a dangerous thing.”
“Guilt and the need for punishment.”
Doc agreed with a sigh. “Fortunately neither you nor I, my friend, are burdened by either.”
No sooner had Doc spoken than three dark shapes detached themselves from a black-rusted wrought-iron pier that jutted out into the river at one point at the water’s edge. Doc frowned uneasily and gestured to Jim. “Now, what the hell do we have here?”
Jim squinted in the direction that Doc was pointing. “I don’t know, but I don’t like the look of them. I also don’t like it that they seem to be coming after us.”
Doc turned in his seat and reached under his coat. “Better open the throttle all the way, boy. I don’t like the look of this, either.”
Jim didn’t comment or argue. He just did as he was instructed. The Gun That Belonged to Elvis was in Doc’s right hand, and the older man was clearly not treating this as any joke, coincidence, or false alarm. Under the full power of its twin diesels, the launch surged ahead, but in the reaches of the Styx that flowed past Gehenna, the current was fast and not going their way. Jim glanced back. The slipstream that came with the increased speed whipped his hair across his face. He took a hand from the wheel and pushed it out of his eyes. The black shapes were gaining on them. Jim could now make out that their pursuers were small, hunched, ring-tailed gargoyles riding Jet Skis, two to each craft. Presumably the one in front was doing the driving, but the function of the passenger had yet to reveal itself. That revelation, however, wasn’t long in coming. The rear gargoyle riding the Jet Ski that was closest to them started swinging a steel grappling hook at the end of a long line. Clearly the intention was to intercept and board the launch. Jim, still holding the throttle wide open and zigzagging as best he could to make things hard for the gargoyle cowboy swinging the hook, glanced back at Doc. “What do those things want?”
“My guess is they’re recruiters looking for new meat for the mill.”
“I thought everyone was there by choice.”
“Supposedly, but I guess the locals aren’t above dragging in the odd unsuspecting and weary traveler for a little extra amusement. In these parts, nothing is written in s
tone.”
The gargoyle’s most recent cast had only missed the stern of the boat by a matter of a foot or so, and Jim spun the wheel so they looped and dipped across the full width of the river. “I’m sure as shit not going to Gehenna.”
“I’m with you there, kid. Hold her steady for a minute so I can do something about this.”
While Jim watched the river, and held the launch on as straight and steady a course as he could manage. Doc took careful aim with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis, but the boat was still bouncing enough to make shooting at a moving target highly problematic. Then Jim heard one explosion, followed immediately by a second and third. Jim looked back and the three Jet Skis had vanished. All that remained was some scattered flotsam and smoke on the water. Jim grinned. “You’re one motherfucker of a shot, Doc Holliday.”
Jim had expected Doc to look at least mildly pleased with himself, but the gunfighter’s face was troubled. “Normally I wouldn’t argue with you about that, but the truth is I never fired a single round.”
“What are saying? What happened to those things?”
“Something else blew them up. Something under the water. I had nothing to do with it.”
Aimee McPherson had not emerged from her locked and barred sanctuary for the equivalent of a full three days. After two more inexplicable fainting fits, she was convinced that her nuns and even some of the seraphim and angels were looking at her with increasingly less guarded speculation. She was certain they were secretly discussing whether or not their leader, Divine Mother, and virtual Godhead might be beginning to lose control of her powers and even her grasp on reality.
In the beginning it had been concern and anger over Semple’s refusal to communicate. Next had come the unexplainable intrusions: the cartoon rodents, the sea monster, and the UFO. After that, matters had turned inward, attacking her directly. First a growing pain in her stomach, and an increasing shortness of breath. These had been followed by headaches and double vision; finally there were the fits. The first attack had come out on the terrace, in the open, while walking with her nuns. She had staggered and reeled, hurting and disorientated, with agonizingly white light blazing in her head. The second of these fits, mercifully, had come in private with none of the nuns looking on. That time, the white light was replaced by a terrifying sense of drowning that had left her gasping for air like a goldfish that had flopped from its bowl.
