by Mick Farren
As Jim and the Mystères left the pier and approached the supercar, a chauffeur opened the door for them. He wore the uniform of the Baron Tonnerre’s crack honor guard, and seemed to be yet another part human, part demigod kin of the trireme’s drummer, mistress-overseer, and attendants. Two more similarly uniformed outriders waited a little way in front of the car astride two of the largest Harley-Davidsons in creation.
From this first impression, Jim could only assume that the Voodoo pantheon did everything in massive and highly flamboyant style. This was immediately confirmed as the huge car and its outriders moved forward along the crushed-shell gravel road that led away from the harbor. Screened by stands of cypress, groves of palms, and luxurious banks of rhododendron and fire dragon, sprawling and elaborately fanciful mansions were set back from road, some lit flamboyantly like Graceland on a Tennessee summer night, others remaining masked and dark with strange flames sporadically showing at mullioned windows. In parks and gardens that were at one and the same time both wild but carefully tended, fountains sang and sparkled, and fires burned in braziers atop tall stone beacons. Big cats prowled; peacocks strutted; on one opulent lawn a herd of decorative white rhinos grazed on the greensward and cropped the shubbery. While most of these palaces and mansions favored a basic European billionaire luxury from the school of high Beverly Hills or Colombian narco lord, the open supercar twice passed the formidable, thorn-thicket outer walls of much more traditional Royal Zulu kraals from the time of Cetshwayo. He also spotted no less than four domed and minaretted quasi-mosques, a number of brick beehive structures, but with the bricks fashioned from solid gold and silver, outsized opals, and squared-off blocks of emerald and diamond. He even saw one exact reproduction of the White House, and another of the Alhambra.
When he was first told that he was going to the Island of the Gods, Jim had naively expected to find some across-the-board melting pot of religions and denominations, a place where Baal, Quetzacoatl, Crom, and the Lord Krishna all dwelled discreetly, cheek-by-jowl, like some ecumenical Olympus. In this, he discovered he had been extremely and hopelessly wrong. The Island of the Gods proved to be highly segregated, the exclusive turf of the basic Afro-Creole pantheon along with a few related and kindred spirits.
The big Duesenberg went on climbing higher and higher into the island uplands that culminated in the crater of the volcano. After a while, this started to give Jim pause. Although he was insulated by the quantities of god-rum he had consumed on the Ship of Agoueh, the idea did occur to him that, in the name of sundry gods, more than one white boy had been taken up to a volcano never to return. For a while he contemplated jumping out of the car and making a run for it; he decided against this, however, even though the open supercar was actually proceeding up the white shell road at a very stately pace. He’d noticed quite soon in the ride that, although each god was deity of the manor in his or her own enclave, the highways and byways of the island were heavily patrolled by Baron Tonnerre’s red-uniformed troopers with their peaked caps, gold lightning-flash badges, and inscrutable sunglasses even at night. Presumably their mission was to deter and eject interlopers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Even if he did manage to make a break, Jim figured he’d probably last about twenty minutes loose on his own in the tropical paradise, a very strange stranger in a very strange land.
As the crater neared, Jim increasingly worried he might be earmarked for a dive into the magma; then, to his relief, the car turned off and headed toward a projecting headland where two massive carved megaliths supported an even bigger capstone. This upper stone was shaped like an eagle with its wings extended, and the closer Jim came to this towering structure, the more he realized that he was in the presence of something incredibly old, maybe older than humanity itself. This atmosphere of the impossibly ancient begged the hallowed question of whether the gods had been around before man had crawled from the swamp, or if it had taken humanity to validate their existence. Like most right-thinking individuals, Jim had always been of the latter opinion, but the closer the supercar came to the megastructure, the less certain he became.
The white road terminated a quarter of a mile from the megaliths themselves. Beyond where the road ended, a paved walk had been laid that described a huge spiral almost the same quarter mile in diameter. The car halted and the chauffeur climbed out and opened the door for the passengers to alight. The Mystères indicated that Jim should get out first. He glanced at Danbhala La Flambeau as he stepped down from the car. “And what happens now?”
She gestured to the ancient curving flagged pavement. “You walk the spiral while we wait for the others to come.”
Semple was nothing more than a mass of fragments, down with the atoms, only held in the loose amalgamation of a meteor shower by the attraction of a simple internal gravity. The single mercy was that she felt no pain. In fact, she felt hardly anything, as though she didn’t have enough singular integrity to experience any of the usual mental or physical sensations. An anger at Aimee for doing what she’d done seethed somewhere in the backwash of her previous consciousness. An unfocused fear drifted along with the knowledge she was free-falling into a total unknown, without the power to stop or even slow her headlong progress. Even when she’d died, she’d had Aimee with her as part of the composite. Now she was totally alone—more than alone, if the truth were to be told. Many familiar parts of her mind on which she had always depended were now absent, leaving her ill-equipped to deal with the shocks the future undoubtedly had in store. As far as she could tell, she was in Limbo. She had enough memory left to recall that Limbo was a place rarely mentioned in the Afterlife, the ultimate distant nothing to which a soul could be consigned to loiter in the absolute end of the void until it perhaps chanced randomly to drift in the direction of the Great Double Helix. It was probably fortunate that she didn’t have enough emotional makeup left to feel the rush of terror the prospect of Limbo usually inspired. All Semple could really do was dispassionately observe her surroundings, make of them what she could, and wait to see what would happen next.
Beneath her was a micro-world where shiny billiard-ball protons and neutrons circled majestically around clumped spheroid nuclei, and electrons sparked and flashed in spectacular displays of red, blue, and yellow primal fireworks. A small shard of her being was able to appreciate the beauty of it all. She had always imagined that the subatomic world would be a black empty space and an appreciative fraction of what remained of her mind was surprised at the jostling density of this new environment, but it also reminded her that this might not be a real subatomic environment, merely a personal interpretation of the completely unknowable.
As she drifted farther, she began to see that the animated complexity of spheres and lightning had a finite limit. At something like a curved, if not clearly defined, horizon, the bouncing, oscillating atoms and the flashing electrons ended in a seething margin of quantum foam, and beyond that was a seemingly endless black nothing, empty but for a tiny, multicolored, glowing helix. Semple knew this was the Great Double Helix, but so far away it was reduced to the insignificance of a distant nebula. Aimee’s anger had pushed her unimaginably deep into the unknown. How long would she drift helplessly before she reached a point where the pods might draw her in, and set her on the laborious uphill path to a fresh incorporation? If she got lucky and even reached the distant Double Helix, enough of her sanity might not remain for her to be worth a new persona or a new incarnation. It was lucky she didn’t have too much capacity for forward-looking fear; otherwise she might have started screaming right there and then, embarking on the lurch into dementia with no further ado.
She had assumed that the long wearisome drift into the void would be one of uniform, uneventful tedium. But then the flames appeared, directly in her path at the edge of the void, and she had to revise that idea.
Danbhala La Flambeau had called to Jim as he started along the path of the spiral. “Whatever happens, don’t stop until you reach the center. It’s vitally important t
hat you don’t stop under any circumstances.”
Jim had almost stopped right there and then. His first reaction was to get the hell out, and fast. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to get the hell out to, so Jim continued along the curve of the ancient paving at a reserved saunter. If he couldn’t escape, he was probably best advised to do like Danbhala La Flambeau had told him. On the other hand, he saw no sense in rushing to whatever awaited him when he’d finished traveling this series of ever-decreasing circles.
As Jim completed his first half circle and the path led him past and away from the standing stones, the other gods started to arrive. Some arrived in custom variations of the giant limousine that had brought Jim to the standing stones—Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and Hirondels, a Cord and even an enormous Packard Patrician. Others came by more outlandish means. Marie-Louise, a frail and incredibly old woman in a mantilla and black lace shawl, drove up in an ornate open phaeton, with skeleton driver and footmen and drawn by six black horses, all wearing plumes as though for a funeral. Sarazine Jambe and Clairmesine Clairmeille both appeared in entities of pulsing, revolving light like the one that had, all that time ago, brought La Flambeau, Hypodermic, and Tonnerre to Doc Holliday’s township. The frighteningly beautiful ErzulieSeverine-Belle-Femme insinuated her presence into the area in something similar, a scintillating, undulating, and sinuously dancing aura of perfumed sexuality made glowing, dancing energy. The military form of Ogou Baba, dressed in the white cloak and spiked helmet of a Mamluk, with a gold saber hanging from his belt, rode up on a stamping, snorting, black-as-night stallion. Captain Debas thundered in, kicking up gravel, on an antique Norton motorcycle.
Jim had never seen these new gods before, but their names seemed to reverberate in his head: Kadia Bossou, Baron Le Croix, Mam’zelle Charlotte, Erzulie Taureau, Zantahi Medeh, Ou-An Ille, Gougonne Dan Leh, Man Ivan, An We-Zo, Zaou Pemba, Ti Jean Pied-Cheche, Papa Houng’to. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, they gathered around the outer perimeter of the spiral. Every single one of them would have been enough on his or her own to strike terror in the bravest of mortals; en masse, they were formidable to the point of overkill. Towering figures, in robes and headdresses, uniforms or the alluring near-nudity of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme. Some weren’t even in any approximation of human form. Erzulie Taureau was a massive Babylonian bull with gilded horns and garlands of orchids, Adahi Loko was a similarly exotic elephant, and Baron Azagon was nothing more than a living flame. As they crowded and jostled for position, auras collided and sectors of energy sparked shorts of power, headdresses bobbed and weaved, and the saber of Ogou Baba became entangled in the flowing train of Mam’zelle Charlotte, while his stallion plunged and pranced, nervous in such a vibrant crowd. The only god who was given absolute space to go and do where and what she liked was the venerable Marie-Louise.
The spectacle was such that Jim would have stopped and stared openmouthed, but Danbhala La Flambeau had told him not to stop for any reason, and he wasn’t about to buck that program now that the gods had arrived. Jim went right on walking. La Flambeau hadn’t told him not to look, and as he walked he took in every detail of this sight that few, if any, mortal humans had ever witnessed. Maybe, if he came through all this intact, he really would return to his poetry. The gathering was so close to impossible that it just had to be recorded. At the same time, though, Jim could feel that something was happening to him. Cultures as far apart as the Anastazi in New Mexico and the Druids in England had employed the power of the spiral in their religious and ecstatic ceremonies and rituals. The belief had been that to walk the spiral was, in many ways, an intoxication similar to ingesting yage, peyote, or psilocybin, and as Jim progressed along the endless circular path to the center, he started to subscribe very strongly to that arcane belief. At first it was hard to tell if anything was really amiss, whether he might be entering an altered state. To spot a hallucination is hard in a place where reality at its most normal is an almost hallucinatory condition.
By the third circuit, however, Jim was well aware that the gods had started to lurch and flow one into another, and even the ground beneath his feet was taking on some unique tactile wave patterns. Jim was getting strangely high, flying without benefit of wings, but it certainly wasn’t an unpleasant experience. He could hear the soaring tone of a distant Jimi Hendrix guitar echoing out from some other place on the mountain, and it occurred to him to question why Jimi, the Voodoo Child, wasn’t there at the gathering. He certainly deserved his place. Maybe he was elsewhere on the island, maybe the echoing guitar was real. Jim recalled their obscenely drunken nights at Steve Paul’s Scene in New York City and the last time the two had seen each other at the troubled British open-air rock festival on the Isle of Wight, just human weeks before the two of them had died. “If you’re here, man, get on down and help me out.”
Jim wasn’t joking. His legs were becoming increasingly rubbery and he was having some difficulty staying on the curving path. The inclination to lurch off to the left was increasingly powerful, but La Flambeau held him to making every effort to stay the course. No help came, however. Quite the reverse. The gods seemed to believe that Jim was the key to something and each had something to say to him. They talked at him in a way that made the words throb physically in his head, drowning out the sound of the guitar.
“We used to be the link between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.”
“But no longer.”
“Humans now come through in numbers that increase out of all proportion.”
Jim could feel the gods’ eyes boring into him.
“The humans push us farther and farther from our ancient domains, until all we have left is this island.”
“Humans die and humans die and they go on dying.”
Jim was starting to feel that the Voodoo gods held him personally responsible for their troubles. He wanted to turn and protest, but still he kept walking.
“The numbers of them expand and expand again. All the time, more and more humans crowd into what was once our world.”
As he rounded the curve that brought him to the point where he was moving back toward the megaliths, he clearly saw the red eyes of Dr. Hypodermic among all of the others. “It surely can’t be that bad.”
Hypodermic’s eyes glowed angrily in the darkness. “It’s worse than bad.”
“But you can’t hold me responsible. I didn’t want to die. I would happily have gone on living, well into the twenty-first century.”
“You humans have no respect for the unique properties of this Afterlife. You stab it with knives in the heart of the dawn. You shatter the patterns of harmony. You pay no respect to those who were here before. You waste its pure base energy in the shaping of diseased environments, built from false memories and evil dreams. You rip and you plunder, trampling underfoot the magical potential of the true treasures.”
In the background, the Hendrix guitar wailed a sustained note of raw bleak grief.
“You have all but doomed your own lifeside world and you seek to do the same to ours.”
The painfully beautiful face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, surrounded by a halo of black diamond flame, floated into Jim’s increasingly psychedelic field of vision. Jim suddenly found himself aching for the god-woman, unable to stand her expression of sad reproach. “For us, the fruitfulness of humanity is the curse of extinction. We gods, spirits, and demons are an endangered species. Do you want to see us gone from this place?”
Jim kept walking. Unbidden tears ran down his face. All he wanted was for Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme to enfold him in her arms and tell him that he was forgiven, but still he managed to keep on walking. He knew if he stopped, everything would fail. “Of course not. You’re the gods.”
The face of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme was replaced by that of the incalculably ancient Marie-Louise. “Then you will do anything that we ask of you?”
The trip was becoming desperate. “Of course I will. You already know
that. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
“You don’t have to be told. You will know.”
Jim could feel his sanity slipping, but he kept on walking. “You keep telling me that.”
The bright black eyes in the shrunken wrinkled face penetrated clear into Jim’s soul. “That is the first thing we require of you. You must make the leap of faith. The blind leap of faith.”
Jim shook his head. The center of the circle was very close. “I’ve been leaping blind all my days. I was the fucking Lizard King!”
Marie-Louis smiled as though Jim had finally stated the obvious. “That’s why you were selected.”
The curving path ended in a flat, circular, blood-red stone, engraved with the Sword of La Place, dividing it into the equal and opposite halves, pethro and rada, the alive and the dead, the good and the evil, while the symbols of the joukoujou veves extended all around the circumference. Without knowing why, only that it needed to be done, Jim deliberately placed one foot on either side of the sword. Then he turned and screamed to the gods, “So what do I do now?”
“Face the stones.”
Jim slowly did what he was told and saw the stars. Between the stones, exactly framed by the two uprights and the lintel they supported, a geometric arrangement of nine stars blazed unwinkingly, only visible from the exact center of the spiral.
