by Mick Farren
“He has to be found.”
“I’ve got nuns looking for him all over, but there’s a distinct chance that he’s already out of here.”
Semple and Aimee exchanged glances. The situation appeared increasingly sticky. Semple knew that all Aimee wanted to do was cut loose and rage all over her, but she wasn’t about to do it while the nuns were watching. Under the constant scrutiny, they had to maintain a united front and pray that Jesus was still around and would be caught. Semple walked past Bernadette to where the body was lying on the grass. The nuns around it glared at her with open hostility, but so far they didn’t seem to feel ready to make any kind of overt move, although one of them did snarl out of the corner of her mouth, “Why don’t you get away from her? You’re not wanted here.”
Semple glanced down at the corpse and then fixed the nun with a glacial glare. “Believe me, I don’t want to be here, either.”
It only took one long look to satisfy Semple that everything Bernadette had said was true. She turned her back on the angry nuns and returned to where Aimee was standing. “She’s right. It’s just like the other one.”
The body of Mary-Theresa wasn’t the first of Jesus’ victims to be discovered. Just four hours before, the body of one of the dancing girls from the headland had been found in the rosebushes below the terrace, bearing identical marks of violent abuse. It was clearly the worst crisis in the history of Aimee’s Heaven, and try as she might, Semple couldn’t shake a certain measure of guilt. She was the one who had set the whole nightmare train of events in motion. Back in Gojiro’s brain tumor, it seemed like a fine prank to inflict a lunatic on her sister, but now that the prank had turned into a serial killer rampage, she knew she didn’t have a moral leg to stand on. She supposed she could claim that at the time she’d had no idea of the extent of his lunacy, but she knew that plea would fail to cut much ice with either Aimee or the nuns.
Bernadette, who was rapidly emerging as the undisputed leader and primary spokeswoman of Heaven’s nuns, may have had squads searching all over the environment for the homicidal messiah, and even bluebirds recruited to act as scouts and spotters, but Semple had grave doubts about whether they were going to find him. Had she been him, she would have had her nasty fun and then been gone like a cool breeze. On the other hand, she was aware that she was making the cardinal error of equating his thought processes with her own. It was something she should long since have learned never to do. Psychos didn’t think like her or anyone else. They heard the voice of the Almighty, Sam the Dog, or the TV set in their head, and acted accordingly. Given that, it was extremely possible Jesus was still around. Such was this last straw she clutched at, but without much expectation that it would keep her afloat. Thus, when the shout went up, the tally-ho that the quarry had been sighted, Semple was among the most surprised of all.
Jesus was initially spotted by a bluebird. He was skulking and muddy, on the far side of the headland where no one ever went, because, as a piece of coherent reality, it wasn’t properly finished. Following the bluebird’s directions, the nuns gathered, and armed with rakes, hoes, shovels, and other gardening implements pressed into service as weapons, they went to intercept him in a crew only slightly more disciplined than a lynch mob. Semple sent her rubber guards with them, with instructions that they should restrain or deflect the nuns should they decide to discorporate Jesus on the spot. Semple wasn’t altogether sure, though, that the rubber guards would actually be able to pull it off. They hadn’t fared too well in the transfer from her domain to Heaven, and were looking saggy and a little strained around the seams.
Needless to say, neither Semple, Aimee, nor Mr. Thomas went with the nuns. If the search did indeed end with Jesus swinging from a stately oak, the necktie party could all too easily be expanded to include the three of them. The two sisters and the goat waited on the terrace; for the next twenty-five minutes, they listened to the shouts and the coordinating whistles as the hunters closed in.
Jesus was bruised and bloody when he was finally dragged to Aimee. He hadn’t actually been lynched, but beyond that the sisters had shown precious little mercy. His white robe was torn and filthy, his sandals were gone, and he had wisely lost the halo. For one so beat up, he showed amazingly little remorse or repentance. They brought him to the bottom of the steps that led up to the terrace, so Aimee was at least able to pass judgment while looking down at the man. For the moment, the nuns were still respecting her authority. Jesus, however, showed nothing but contempt for the ad hoc proceedings. He seemed unable to grasp that his life was at stake. His first move of defiance was to shake himself free of the nuns who were holding his arms, and angrily protest to Aimee. “Do you have no control over these maniac women?”
Semple had to admit that her sister rose to the occasion with an inspired magnificence. Despite all the tension that had gone before, she drew herself up to her full height and regarded Jesus with a demeanor of judicial frost. “From where I’m standing, I can only see one maniac.”
Jesus’ two hands indicated his injuries and disheveled clothes. “You can see what these mad bitches have done to me.”
“They are understandably angry.”
“And what right do they have to be angry?”
“Do you deny that you attacked and mutilated at least two of their number?”
“Why should I deny it? I was invited here to help you expand your environment and I presumed that I had all of its facilities at my disposal.”
Bernadette glared at him, fists and teeth clenched. “Including women to murder and mutilate according to your sick whim?”
Jesus ignored her and continued to address his remarks to Aimee. “These women I’m supposed to have attacked. What were they? Surely nothing more than property. Why should a few of them disappearing present any kind of problem? I’m entitled to my fun, aren’t I?”
This produced a noisy and dangerous outburst from the women. Unlike Semple, they hadn’t heard this glib argument before. They hadn’t known Anubis. Jesus was nunhandled and jostled, and Semple’s rubber guards moved quickly to protect him. Aimee held up her hand for silence. When the tumult finally subsided, Jesus looked around angrily. “I’m not saying another word until I get a lawyer.”
Aimee looked at him as though he were insane. “A lawyer?”
“That’s right, a lawyer.”
“You think there are lawyers in Heaven?”
He pointed to Semple. “What about her?”
Semple looked outraged. “No McPherson has ever been a lawyer. Preachers and horse thieves, maybe, but never a lawyer.”
A superior smile spread across Jesus’ face. “This trial can hardly continue if I can’t have adequate representation.”
Bernadette shouted angrily, “You can speak for yourself, can’t you?”
Now it was Aimee’s turn to look superior. “And who said this was a trial?”
Jesus’ smile faded. “So what is it, then?”
“I merely wanted to hear what you had to say before I passed sentence.”
“You can’t sentence me. I’m Jesus Christ and this is supposed to be Heaven. You’ve got a major jurisdictional problem on your hands. I’m the Son of God, damn it.” He turned and looked at the nuns. “I mean, all of you, you’re all supposed to be brides of Christ, aren’t you? So, if that’s the case, you all belong to me and you shouldn’t be creating this nonsense.”
Bernadette and the other nuns could hardly credit what they were hearing. “We don’t belong to you, you son of a bitch.” They gestured to Aimee. “We don’t even belong to her.”
Jesus abruptly changed tack. He became the affable, placating used-car salesman. “Okay, okay. I tell you what. Let’s look at this another way. I admit that I messed up the women. It was a mistake. I confess. I shouldn’t have done it. I thought they were part of the facilities and I thought I was mutilating them in good faith, but that was an error. If anyone’s got a problem with me mutilating women, I’m sorry. Different strokes and all t
he rest of it. It’s probably a result of all the TV I’ve watched. But why don’t we just leave it at that? I’ll get the fuck out of here and I’ll promise to stop telling people that I’m Jesus Christ and we’ll forget the whole thing. I mean, think about it. What’s the point of sending me back to the pods? I’ll be just the same when I get out. Maybe even worse.”
When Jesus finished, an incredulous silence settled. Then a lone nun spoke in a quiet voice. “Crucify him.”
The refrain was taken up and grew louder. “Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
Bernadette held up a hand and the shouting subsided. “We should do worse than crucify him. We should peel his skin off in strips.”
The idea gained an immediate constituency. “And then cut up his flesh in even smaller pieces.”
“And barbecue each piece as he’s forced to watch.”
Semple determinedly shook her head. “No barbecue. No cannibalism.”
The traditionalists began shouting again. “Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
Aimee was determined to have the last word; ever the traditionalist herself, she decided to stick with the tried and tested. “Behold the man! He shall be crucified.”
The crowd broke into wild applause. Jesus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait a minute . . . ”
Aimee looked at Bernadette. For once, they were in complete accord. “Is there a fresh cross?”
“There is.”
“Nails?”
“All we need. It only takes three.”
“Just wait a minute . . . ”
“Then take him to Golgotha and make it so.”
As Jesus was dragged away kicking and screaming, Aimee turned on Semple. “Now it’s your turn.”
“What do you mean, it’s my turn?”
“You brought that monster here, didn’t you?”
“I told you he wasn’t any real Jesus Christ, and you were more than happy to go along with the gag.”
Now that they were alone, Aimee was almost hyperventilating. “Is that what you thought it was? A gag? Just one of your accursed pranks? Do you know what you’ve done to me? Bernadette and her nuns will be at my throat the moment they’ve finished with your damned Jesus.”
Semple hadn’t realized just how tightly wrapped her sister really was. “I didn’t know he was a serial killer, goddamn it.”
“That’s your trouble, isn’t it? You never do know, do you?”
“Are you aware what I went through just to get him for you?”
“From the feedback I got, it looked like you were whoring your way across the Afterlife, and finding that creature was nothing more than an afterthought.”
Now Semple was losing her temper. “Yeah? Is that what you think?”
Aimee was turning red in the face, an effect that verged on the grotesque with her pale complexion and golden hair. “You don’t give a damn about me, do you?
Semple smiled nastily. “Why would I? As you keep telling me, I’m no good. I’m the whore, aren’t I? I’m the evil twin.”
Semple realized she shouldn’t have smiled. Aimee lost all control and began to vibrate; she was building up a head of destructive force that, when it reached a crucial peak, she would launch at Semple, blasting her to kingdom come. “Don’t start vibrating like that; you’ll hurt someone.”
Aimee’s voice became powerfully strange; Semple would have suspected demonic possession if she hadn’t known better. “Do you know how much I hate you?”
Semple raised a defensive vibration of her own. The two sisters were now close to violent conflict. “Of course I know how much you hate me. That’s why we separated. I really wouldn’t try to do anything to me, though. You’d have a lot of trouble surviving without me; you saw how things fell apart when I was away from here.”
Logic made no dent in Aimee’s fury. “And do you know how much, above everything, I hate knowing I have to keep you around?”
The sound of hammer blows came from away in Golgotha and Jesus started screaming. Semple half turned, momentarily distracted. Her guard dropped, and in the nano-instant Aimee struck.
Jim stepped ashore on the Island of the Gods to the sound of drums. Drums were beating all over the tropical island, and complex crossrhythms pulsed through the warm, sweet, slightly sticky air. He was already accustomed to having everything accompanied by a hollow and echoing throb, like a universal and collective heartbeat. Drums had hammered on the trireme, keeping the rowers to their designated stroke. The drummer on the galley sat central and elevated, sternward on the well deck, behind and above the tiers of oarsmen, pounding his mallets into the hard hide heads of his twin kettledrums with massive repetitive strokes of his tree-trunk arms. The drummer in his loincloth and oiled torso, and the tall broadshouldered female overseer in studded leather who wielded the whip, could almost have been brother and sister. With the woman standing well over seven feet tall and the drummer possessed of muscles beyond the wildest steroid dreams of any human bodybuilder, they seemed to be some midpoint hybrid of man and god, like the legendary Hercules or the Titans.
The trireme was longer, sleeker, and of tighter trim than the other galley that Jim had seen plowing up the Great River, but it still used bench-chained prisoners for propulsion. On his arrival Jim had wondered why the Voodoo gods didn’t use zombies to provide the manpower for the galley. He had pointed this out to Danbhala La Flambeau, who had shaken her head as if to suggest that Jim had watched too many cheap horror movies. “Zombies were ruined by George Romero, boy. These are Obeah submissives who love every minute of it.”
Jim’s major surprise had been, of course, that he, Dr. Hypodermic, and Danbhala La Flambeau hadn’t simply wind-walked directly to the island, but had set down in this galley, which was, as far as Jim could estimate, lying some ten miles off the night-shrouded coast. They had jaunted from the Crossroads to the boat by the same kind of instant special shift that Hypodermic had employed to take him to Vietnam, the padded cell, and all the rest of the locations that they had visited, and he couldn’t understand why the boat was needed as an intermediate stopover. When he asked about this, he’d received another impatient reply. “This is the transit point, the Ship of Agoueh. Everyone has to come in this way. We can’t just have people floating directly to the Island of the Gods. If we allowed that, we’d go the way of Hell and be reduced to nothing more than a tourist park.”
Not that finding himself at sea bothered Jim unduly. He actually welcomed the time aboard to acclimate to the idea that he was entering a whole new phase of his Afterlife. He was able to lean on the rail of the quarterdeck where the gods took their ease, while dolphins, orcas, and undulating manta rays lazily shadowed the boat, marlins jumped in the mid-distance, and families of sea monkeys danced in the purple troughs of the gentle swell of what, to Jim’s mind, couldn’t be anything but Byron’s wine-dark sea. He did note, however, that he was yet again traveling across the Afterlife by water and he wondered, as he stared at the approaching island, whether there was any symbolic or mystical significance to the fact that so many of his recent journeys were by made by way of river, sewer, swamp, or ocean.
The appearance of the island itself revealed very little, just a dark mass in the soft deceptive night with the red lava glow of a volcano at one end of the landmass. Jim looked a little dubiously at the volcano. He’d seen quite enough hot angry mountains lately and he hoped they weren’t becoming another recurrent motif. He couldn’t raise much enthusiasm for an Afterlife spent slowly sailing past volcanoes. He did suppose, however, that the Island of the Gods couldn’t really exist without one. Presumably some of the inhabitants actually needed to live inside it. But the red lava glow wasn’t the only illumination on the island. A thousand points of light, either moving or static, indicated that the Island of the Gods was anything but underpopulated. They winked and twinkled like tiny ge
ms, instilling the place with the needed quality of magic, even from a distance.
Another advantage to the brief interval on the boat had been the attendants. The tall, slender, coffee-colored Amazons looked as if they came from the same basic gene pool as the drummer and the woman with the whip, and they seemed to have the sole purpose of keeping the passengers satisfied. They served him rum-based fruit drinks that came complete with slices of pineapple and small paper umbrellas. One had even offered to give him a rubdown with herbs and hot oil. Jim had been sorely tempted, but he’d shot a covert glance across the quarterdeck to where the three Mystères were deep in earnest conversation in a bizarre and lilting Creole patois. In addition to the Doctor and Danbhala La Flambeau, the Baron Tonnerre was also aboard the Ship of Agoueh. Indeed, he had been waiting in one of his elaborate, bemedaled uniforms when they’d arrived on board. The original trio was again complete, and Jim decided that maybe a massage was too frivolous for an occasion invested with such gravity, even if no one was about to tell him why. He passed up the hot oil and herb rubdown and settled for a succession of the powerful rum drinks. As a result, when the trireme shipped its oars and moored at the pier, and Jim finally descended the gangplank, he was more than three parts drunk and walking a little unsteadily.
Mercifully, Jim found he wasn’t required to walk very far. An open car with a landau top was waiting. It was unlike any car Jim had ever encountered, dwarfing any automobile he’d seen in either dream or life. The hood alone must have been thirty feet long and the tonnage of chrome outweighed that of even the most fancifully customized semi, and that wasn’t to mention the gold trim. From knowledge acquired from his long-lost hot-rod home boys back in the metalflake sixties California of Big Daddy Ed Roth and Rat Fink, Jim knew that the lustrous pearlized finish could only have been achieved by a minimum of twenty-nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer, platinum dust, and exotic fish scales. It was truly the cherry paint job of the gods. The machine might once have been a 1930s movie-star Duesenberg, but it had been stretched, enlarged, extended, and so elaborately curved and curliqued that it was scarcely recognizable. Jim wondered who might create and customize these mobile palaces for the ancient African gods. Did they dream them up themselves and just make them real in a flash of kinetic magic? Or were there somewhere, perhaps in sweating caves under the volcano, holy and secret chop shops where car-culture Leonardos pushed the envelopes of their talent, working with dedication and diligence for their exalted masters?
