Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  “Yeah, right. Of course.” Jim didn’t exactly seem convinced.

  The Virgil looked almost offended. “No, no, young sir. I assure you. We could hardly function if our discretion was held in any doubt. This is Hell, after all. Many who need a guide do not want their purpose or destination made public.”

  Jim looked inquiringly at Doc. “Do we trust him?”

  “I think we have to. I don’t have a clue where we should go.”

  He faced the Virgil. “So, altissimo poeta, do you think you can get us out of the city without being seen or intercepted?”

  “That may well be up to you, young sir.”

  Jim stared at the Virgil with deep suspicion. “And what is that supposed to mean, altissimo poeta?”

  The Virgil’s face was a mask of formality, impossible to read. “The ancient ways, the ones that are seldom used any longer, these are the paths to take if you need to leave here undetected.”

  Doc’s eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting we ride the Dragon, altissimo poeta?”

  Bernadette and her renegades had stopped chanting, and Aimee knew she had to assume they were on their way to the Sacristy. She looked around at the assembled nuns and angels. “I think it’s time we joined hands. I hate to abandon the Heaven we’ve all worked so hard to create, but the angel here does have the only practical suggestion. We must seek refuge in Semple’s domain.”

  What Aimee wasn’t admitting to her small band of followers was that she wasn’t at all sure Semple’s domain was still actually there. It might have imploded when she’d blown Semple into Limbo. If the little group wind-walked to a place that wasn’t there, they would find themselves randomly consigned to absolutely anywhere. They could easily end up, either individually or as a group, in a place that was completely uninhabitable, airless, burning hot or freezing cold, or filled with ravening predators. Despite this, Aimee had already conceded that it would probably be better than crucifixion and whatever Bernadette, in her new role as the Hammer of God, might decide to inflict on them before they were actually nailed to their respective crosses. Aimee suspected that Bernadette was entertaining dreams of inquisition and auto-da-fé. To return to the pods was one thing; prolonged torture was entirely another.

  The group linked hands and the energy began to flow. Although they were only eight in number and were badly depleted by recent events, Aimee knew they should be able to raise the power to lift out of there. She focused all her concentration on what she remembered from her single visit to Semple’s territory, and hoped against hope that a destination would still exist when they arrived. As they waited to dematerialize, any question of turning back or revising the plan was eliminated. Bemadette’s rebels began battering on the Sacristy’s carved oak door. The door was formidable, but it would only be a matter of time before they broke it down.

  The attack came out of nowhere. One moment Semple, Doc, Jim, and the Virgil had been walking quietly through one of the larger passages in the maze of dank subterranean avenues that made up the greater part of Hell’s Third Circle. This fairly deserted thoroughfare of cobbles, paths, and dripping stones—a habitat for grotesque creeping things and misshapen growths of fungi—was an ideal place for an ambush, but they were being reasonably vigilant, and certainly not loitering. The next moment Semple let out a low gurgle and was suddenly dragged backward. The section of passage through which they were traveling wasn’t particularly well lighted, with only ancient, hissing Jack-the-Ripper gaslights every thirty feet, and it took Jim and Doc a couple of seconds to grasp exactly what had happened. A dark figure had slipped out of a doorway, tossed a knotted white scarf around Semple’s neck, and dragged her backward, strangling her. Jim, who was nearest to Semple, had already returned the Gun That Belonged to Elvis to Doc, but even if he’d still had the piece, it wouldn’t have done him very much good. The black-clad attacker was not only throttling Semple, but using her as a shield while he did so. Doc pulled the gun, but from where he was standing, Jim and the Virgil stood in the way of a clear shot.

  Jim saw that he was Semple’s only chance. Without thinking, he lunged forward, fists swinging. More by luck than judgment, he connected with the dark shape and heard a muttered curse. He punched twice more and connected again. The attacker let go of one end of the scarf and pushed Semple hard into Jim. As Semple dropped to her knees, coughing and choking, Jim stepped around her and lashed out with his foot, attempting to trip the assassin as he turned to flee. Jim had never exactly been a brawler, but some kind of street-fighting good fortune seemed to be with him there in the Third Circle. His kick swept the attacker’s feet out from under him and he fell heavily on the cobblestones. Jim dropped on top of him, pinning his arms. The attacker still had his legs free, however, and attempted to break loose from Jim by bucking and kicking. In two paces, though, Doc was by Jim’s side, pistol in hand, pointing it at the attacker’s head.

  “Keep still, you son of a bitch, or I’ll put a gold .45 slug clear through your damned brain.”

  At least the assassin had enough common sense to know a fait accompli when he saw one and he stopped struggling. As Jim pushed himself off, he was surprised to find his hands making contact with a full breast and a narrow waist. “Holy shit, it’s a woman!”

  Doc pushed him out of the way. Now that they were able to see a little better, Jim’s tactile discovery was a little more obvious. It was indeed a woman—a very good-looking young woman—dressed in a black cape and a kind of one-piece ninja leotard. Her face was hidden behind a black bandanna, and she was wearing an extremely elaborate pair of boots with dozens of tiny buckles. As Jim straightened up, Doc leaned down and pulled away the bandanna. The face that was revealed had dark coffee-colored skin, large angry eyes and a red caste mark exactly in the middle of the forehead. Doc whistled under his breath. “A thugette.”

  “A what?”

  “A thugette, one of Kali’s killer virgins. The distaff version of the thugee.”

  “You mean like in Stranglers of Bombay?”

  Doc nodded. “Right, if you must equate everything with some low-budget movie to get a handle on it. They kill for the goddess with the knotted scarf.”

  The Virgil was helping a coughing Semple, who, despite the obvious discomfort of a nearly crushed windpipe, moved quickly to where Doc and Jim were standing over the prone assassin. Picking up the knotted scarf on the way, she took one look at the buckled boots and went whiter than she already was. “Goddamn it. I saw that homicidal bitch in the coffee shop at the Mephisto. We sat at the same table. I even spoke to her.”

  Doc glanced up and down the street. “She must have been one of Kali’s minders, waiting for her mistress to get out of Lucifer’s poker game. I guess she’s been following us ever since we left the hotel.”

  Semple frowned. “The question is, what do we do with her now? We can’t let her go and report back.”

  She glanced significantly at the gun in Doc’s hand, but Doc shook his head. “I can’t shoot a woman in cold blood.”

  Semple glared at him. “Why the fuck not? She tried to waste me, didn’t she?”

  Suddenly the women spasmed briefly, gasped out a choking gurgle, stiffened, and then went limp. Doc quickly knelt down beside her and felt the side of her neck for a pulse. “She’s solved the problem for us.”

  “She’s left for the pods?”

  “Or wherever her kind go. She must have had a cyanide tooth.”

  By this point, the Virgil had also joined them and he looked very unhappy. “Good sirs and lady, did I overhear you correctly? Is it Lucifer and Kali from whom you flee?”

  Doc nodded grimly. “I fear it is, altissimo poeta.”

  “Then I must respectfully terminate our agreement. I am a Virgil and it is implicitly understood that I leave at the first sign of danger.” He gestured to the thugette’s inert body. “And that is a more than contractually adequate first sign.”

  Doc gestured with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. “I’m sorry, altissimo poeta, but
we are going to have to impose on you over and above the terms of any implied agreement. You will lead us to the start of the Dragon Ride, or I will, with the greatest regret, send you after this young woman here.”

  The Virgil looked at Jim and Semple, but they gave him no sign that they were in anything but total agreement with Doc. “I must protest this, good sir. I will lead you, but this is no way to treat a Virgil.”

  Doc lowered the pistol to his side, but didn’t return it to its holster. “Your protest is noted, altissimo poeta.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m the only one left, aren’t I?”

  The very last thing Mr. Thomas needed was the sudden appearance of Aimee McPherson, five nuns, and two angels right in the Louis XVI Suite of Semple’s domain. Since Aimee had totaled her sister, the environment had been shaken by what he could only think of as a series of violent earth tremors, bringing down plaster and mosaic tiles from the ceilings, shaking objects from shelves, causing paintings and artworks to come crashing down, and creating jagged structural cracks in the floors and walls. He knew the earth tremors weren’t truly seismic disturbances. They were a symptom that Semple, as the Afterlife knew her, was history, and her environment would progressively collapse as her residual energy dissipated and ebbed away to chaos and entropy. What would become of him when that happened was highly debatable. In the aftermath of Aimee’s trashing of Semple, he had managed to slip away and windwalk back to the domain under his own power. That, unfortunately, was about as far as he was able to make it unaided, and without help he wasn’t going any farther.

  Right then, though, Mr. Thomas hadn’t been thinking too much about the future. While Semple’s real estate remained more or less real, he had resolved to get drunk and stay drunk. To this end he had formed an alliance with Igor, who had discovered that the wine cellar and liquor cache had remained pretty much intact through the upheavals. The only unfortunate part was that Igor showed absolutely no inclination to leave. His fealty to Semple was such that he wanted nothing more than to go down with the sinking illusion. Mr. Thomas hoped that, as the place started to come more unglued, the Peter Lorre–looking butler might reexamine his devotion to a woman who was long gone; perhaps the two of them would join forces and attempt to get away. In the meantime, the goat had resolved to let the martinis flow and face the hangover when it came.

  In Mr. Thomas’s opinion, Aimee McPherson, with her crew of nuns and angels, pretty much qualified as an early and unwanted hangover. He couldn’t imagine why they should come bursting in, but he knew he was going have to deal with it, and since Igor seemed to have pulled a vanishing act, he was going to have to deal with it on his own. His first tactic was to go for open hostility. He might be a little unsteady on his four legs, on account of how recently he’d forsworn glasses and taken to drinking his martinis from a galvanized bucket, but he had a full head of resentment to use as fuel. He planted himself squarely in front of the blond McPherson sister and looked her up and down with as much Welsh contempt as he could muster. “So what’s the big idea, toots? You come here with a team to loot out your sister’s domain before it falls apart?”

  One of the nuns advanced angrily on him. “How dare you talk to our Holy Shepherdess like that? You can’t address the Lady Aimee as ‘toots.’ ”

  Aimee motioned the nuns back. “Leave him be. He’s probably upset.”

  Mr. Thomas nodded. “Damn right I’m upset. And I’m also shit-faced drunk. Ever since I fell in with you McPherson sisters, it’s been nothing but trouble, but right now we’re not talking about me. You still haven’t explained why you’re here.”

  “We came here looking for a sanctuary.”

  “A sanctuary? Don’t make me laugh. There’s no sanctuary here. The place is on the verge of coming apart. You might as well look for refuge in the House of Usher.”

  “The other nuns—”

  “Turned on you, did they, now?”

  Aimee was still spent from the wind-walk out of Heaven, coming as it did on top of the huge amount of energy she had expended on Semple. Explaining herself to a goat was more unnecessary effort than she really cared to squander. “The militant one, Bernadette, she’s started calling herself the Hammer of God.”

  “So you thought you’d hide here from her and her gang?”

  “We didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Didn’t occur to you that this might be the first place she’d come looking?”

  “It was the only thing we could do.”

  “So now I’m going to wind up sharing whatever nails this Hammer of God wants to drive into you and yours?”

  Aimee started to get angry. “Don’t you think of anything but your own miserable self?”

  Mr. Thomas drew back his goat lips in a mirthless sneer. “Lately, I seem to be all I’ve got.”

  A sudden wheezing sound behind him told Mr. Thomas he was no longer facing Aimee and her nuns and angels alone. Three of Semple’s rubber guards tottered slowly into the reproduction of Versailles, moving like a trio of Frankenstein monsters in a cheap Universal horror movie, and breathing like Darth Vader. Since Semple’s departure the rubber guards had become increasing slow and cumbersome, but it seemed that they could still make an entrance. Ignoring Mr. Thomas, they lumbered toward Aimee and her people, with the leader issuing his formal challenge in a voice like a slowed-down phonograph record. “You-are-unauthorized-intruders. You-will-remain-exactly-where-you-are-or-we-will-open-fire.”

  The rubber guards may have been slow, but they still had their weapons, and these were pointed directly at Aimee, the nuns, and the angels. Aimee looked quickly at Mr. Thomas. “Can’t you call them off or something?”

  Mr. Thomas shook his head. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now that Semple’s no longer with us, the only person they respond to is Igor and he’s hiding somewhere.”

  Aimee’s nuns were looking increasingly confused. “What does he mean, now that Semple’s gone?”

  Aimee rounded on her angrily. “Shut up, you stupid bitch. This isn’t the time.”

  Mr. Thomas laughed drunkenly. “You mean you haven’t told them what you did to your poor little sister?”

  Aimee turned and snarled at the goat, “If I had a weapon . . .”

  “But you don’t, do you, Aimee?”

  Before Aimee could formulate a comeback, the rubber guard leader started with the second phase of his warning. “You-are-unauthorizedintruders. You-have-twenty-relative-seconds-to-remove-yourselvesfrom-this-environment-or-suffer-the-consequences.”

  Aimee looked distraughtly from the rubber guard to Mr. Thomas and back again. “Can’t you get Igor and make him call them off?”

  The goat shook his head. “Not unless Igor wants to be got. I fear it may be the pods for you, Holy Shepherdess.”

  “Is the Dragon Ride what I think it is?”

  The Virgil avoided Jim’s eyes. He, Jim, Semple, and Doc were hurrying along a dim, narrow, rarely used passageway, another thoroughfare in Hell where the stalactites had completely taken over the ceiling and moss and algae grew on the damp walls. The Virgil was clearly more concerned about Doc Holliday, who still had the Gun That Belonged to Elvis hidden at his side, than he was with Jim’s questions. “It is one of the oldest and least used ways out of here.”

  “And it’ll supply the energy to move us?”

  The Virgil nodded. “It will do that.”

  “But there are problems?”

  “There are certain . . . ” The Virgil glanced uneasily at Doc, as though worried he might shoot him should he deliver any bad news.

  Doc attempted to allay the Virgil’s fear. “Certain what, altissimo poeta?”

  “What you might call . . . side effects, good sir. I have never personally ridden the Dragon, so I cannot speak from experience, but I have it on good authority that one needs to concentrate very hard on one’s destination, and, even then, certain di
stracting illusions may present themselves.”

  Jim didn’t like the sound of this. “Distracting illusions?”

  “As I said, I have never taken the Dragon Ride, young sir. Indeed, it is only the Virgils and a few others who even know of its existence.”

  Semple cut straight to the heart of the matter. “But it will get us out of Hell?”

  “It will do that, madame.”

  “Then that’s all we need to know for the moment.”

  It wasn’t quite enough for Jim. “If we have to focus on a destination, it might be an idea to have some destination in mind. Simply wanting to get out of Hell covers a whole mess of territory, and I, for one, have been shuttling between fires and frying pans a bit too much recently.”

  Semple wasn’t in the least fazed by the question. “The obvious answer would be for us to all go to my domain.”

  Doc sniffed. “All back to your place?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  Doc shook his head. “No problem. I was just wondering if you still had a place to go back to. How do you know it’s still intact, after your sister blew you off into Limbo?”

  “It’s there. I built it and I can still sense it. It’s a bit battered around the edges, but it’s still there. You can trust me on that.”

  Doc looked a trifle squint-eyed, as though trusting Semple’s feeling was hardly the guarantee he wanted. “I’m supposed to kick off on the Dragon Ride on the say-so of a woman I’ve only just met?”

  Jim quickly intervened. “Give her a break, Doc. I’ll take her word for it. I think maybe I love this woman.”

  Now Semple was looking squint-eyed. “You think maybe you love me? After spending days and days having every kind of sex known to man, woman, god, or beast, you think maybe you love me?”

  Before Jim could come up with an answer, Virgil interrupted. “Sirs, madame, could we please move along? I know I have to accomplish this task, but I’d prefer to discharge it as quickly as possible.”