Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  After carefully inspecting whatever image they were viewing, Hypodermic glanced at La Flambeau. “It’s all going according to plan, wouldn’t you say?”

  Although Jim well knew that gods were impossibly hard to read, they seemed inordinately pleased at the ravages that Aimee’s Heaven had so far suffered. Doc glanced at Jim. “What do you think they’re doing this for?”

  La Flambeau leaned forward as though searching for something. Finally she spotted what she sought, smiled, and pointed. “There you are, Jim Morrison. And Doc Holliday, too. Where’s the McPherson girl?”

  “She’s washing her hair. She got somebody’s brains in it.”

  La Flambeau glanced at the male gods on either side of her and then looked down at Jim and Doc. “The Doctor and the Baron don’t particularly want to admit it, but we all feel that all three of you have done an excellent job.”

  Jim and Doc looked at each other in surprise. “We have?”

  “Indeed you have. This place is now a shambles and no new religion is going to start up here.”

  Doc raised a dangerous eyebrow. “And that’s what we’ve been doing? Putting down self-appointed deities?”

  Jim was thinking. “What I don’t understand is why you should need us to do the dirty work. I mean, you’re gods—you’re all-powerful. You could have taken out Anubis with a deftly aimed thunderbolt anytime you wanted.”

  The Baron scowled. Jim had never heard him speak in English before and his voice rolled out like thunder on the mountain. “We’re gods, little man. We have more important considerations to absorb our time and our energy. We’re too ancient to get our own hands dirty. And why should we, when we can manipulate the human dead to do it for us?”

  La Flambeau smiled indulgently. “The McPherson girl set in motion a chain of events that caused Gojiro to destroy both Moses and Anubis. And then these women crucified the one who wanted to be Jesus. And now you appear to have neutralized the absurd Aimee and this equally ridiculous Bernadette who calls herself the Hammer of God.”

  Unfortunately, Bernadette chose that moment to demonstrate that she wasn’t quite as neutralized as La Flambeau might have assumed. She stood up in eighteen inches of dirty water, where she’d been washing the blood from her hands and face, and stared truculently at the big screen. “Listen, you trio of abominations. I am a servant of the One True God—”

  Doc attempted to head her off. “Trixie, my dear, I advise you to table this defiant little speech of yours. You can’t even start to comprehend the kind of power you’re going up against.”

  Bernadette glanced back at Doc but decided to ignore him. Once again she faced the screen. “I am the servant of God and nothing you demons can do will deflect me from my purpose.” She gestured to Doc and Jim. “I have the protection of faith around me, and if I decide to crucify these agents of Lucifer that you send against me, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  Some of the red nuns seemed encouraged enough to start retrieving their guns. Jim feared that defeat was about be snatched from the jaws of victory, and he shouted at the Mystères, “I know you don’t like to get your hands dirty, but why the fuck don’t you zap her right now and save us all a whole lot of trouble?”

  The smile with which La Flambeau responded to Jim was nothing short of patronizing. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, mes petits. She is an alarmingly stupid human being and very soon she is actually going to meet her One True God.”

  When she heard a sound behind her, Semple spun around and grabbed for the machine pistol, spraying water from her wet hair like a dog coming in from the rain. Only the sound of a familiar voice stopped her from firing blind. “Semple, it’s all right, it’s only me.”

  Semple had been bent over what might well have been the last functioning sink in Heaven, washing the brains out of her hair with some of Heaven’s remaining hot water. Realizing she wasn’t going to get properly clean in the chaos by the lake, she had hunted through rubble-strewn rooms to find this final intact bathroom. By way of a precaution, she had picked up a red nun’s machine pistol that had been dropped in the confusion, and she didn’t lower it as she pushed her hair out of her eyes and regarded Aimee with slit-eyed distrust. Her sibling stood in the doorway of the bathroom in a filthy robe. “Please Semple. . . . ”

  Semple’s lip curled. “Please Semple, what? Maybe I should just shoot you right there where you’re standing.”

  “I know I did a bad thing, but . . . ”

  “You know I’ve literally been to Hell and back since you saw me last?”

  A hairline crack snaked across the ceiling. Both Aimee and Semple looked up at it. “If someone doesn’t stabilize this place, we’re going to be in an empty void without even a place to stand.”

  “This Jim of yours, he could help pull Heaven back together?”

  “Jim? Are you out of your mind? He’s not the Heaven-building type. He hates bluebirds.”

  “He’d do it for you, wouldn’t he?”

  “Maybe for a while, but in the end he’d get bored and want to move on.”

  “Could he at least help to stabilize it?”

  Semple sighed and lowered the gun. “I suppose he might, but it wouldn’t stop there, would it? I know you, Aimee. You always have to push it. You always have to have that little bit more.”

  “If this place falls apart, I’ll be finished.”

  “You’ll survive, Aimee.”

  “Will I? You’ve seen what happened when we were separated.”

  “If Jim wants to leave, I’m going with him.”

  “You’d choose a man over your sister? You’d just leave me to waste away and vanish?”

  Semple turned; she couldn’t face her sister. “Shit, Aimee, don’t the guilt trips ever stop?”

  Jim was becoming more than a little concerned about the deteriorating condition of the environment. It had been a mess when they had arrived; now it was becoming messier by the minute. Jagged orange-white lightning crashed between huge thunderheads that were rapidly moving in from beyond the mountains. The lake moved with bizarre and chaotic ripples, and huge bubbles broke the surface. The great screen still hung over it, but the images of the Mystères were continuously distorted. The ground under Jim’s feet quivered, while on the headland a small but growing wind vortex whirled dirt, dead leaves, and the limp, lifeless corpses of bluebirds into the air. In the middle of it all, Bernadette was attempting to rally her nuns and angels. Jim yelled to Doc, “By the looks of it, we’ve got some apocalyptic trouble coming hard down on us.”

  A sudden sinkhole, some twenty feet wide, opened in the terrace, right under the scarlet Tiger tank. The machine crashed down into it and its gas tank exploded, shooting flame, black smoke, and chunks of hot metal into the air. Doc coughed blood into his hankerchief and shook his head. “And I fear this is the bona fide end of the world. At least for this cosmic neck of the cosmic woods.”

  In confirmation of just how bona fide the end of the world really was, a great light like something from the Book of Revelation blossomed in the sky. A nun began screaming, “It’s God, I see God!”

  Doc stared at the sky with a resigned and quizzical expression. “Either that or a thermonuclear airburst was just added to our catalogue of woe.”

  A section of corridor ceiling crashed down behind Aimee and Semple, and the two of them broke into a run. A crystal chandelier was dripping liquid glass like melting ice. The vibration was now worse than the worst earthquake Semple had ever experienced in lifeside Los Angeles or San Francisco. She was still carrying the gun she’d found, but she had little idea as to what she was going to do next. Her single impulse was to get out into the open before the entire structure collapsed and buried them. She imagined that if one was buried alive it could take an agonizing time to expire and that wasn’t the way she wanted to return to the pods, fighting for breath as dirt filled her mouth, nose, and lungs, and chunks of masonry crushed her bones. Her only thought was to get back to Jim and Doc, and if re
lying on the two men was the best she could come up with, she knew she was tactically tapped out.

  The building shook again and a huge chunk of plaster smashed into the floor directly in front of them. Aimee stumbled over a fallen beam and would have gone down if Semple hadn’t grabbed her by the arm. “Just keep moving, okay? Just keep moving.”

  Aime clung to Semple, her grip like a vice. “Semple, promise me.”

  “Promise you what?”

  “Promise you won’t let me just disappear into nothing.”

  The white light became approximately spherical and touched down between the lake and the terrace, if “touched down” was the right phrase. Bit by bit it began to diminish until it was no longer so hard on the eyes, and a figure became visible at its center. Jim wondered if perhaps one of the Mystères had relented and decided to rescue them after all. Hypodermic, La Flambeau, and Tonnerre were still up on the screen, but the chance remained that some other Voodoo god had taken pity on them. If he was really lucky, maybe it was the beautiful Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, or at least Ogou Baba or the venerable Marie-Louise.

  The glare of the sphere not only diminished, but flattened to the ground, became two-dimensional, and spread rapidly outward, running across what had once been Aimee’s prize lawn, hugging the contours in a perfect geometric ring of bright energy. Many of the nuns fled as it came toward them, but since Doc was standing his ground, Jim did the same, and as the arc of energy went past and through him he felt nothing but a slight electric tingle. He looked to Doc for some kind of comment, but Doc was staring intently at the figure that stood in the epicenter of the power ring.

  The figure was certainly not one of the Voodoo gods Jim had previously seen, and totally lacked any trace of their characteristic flamboyance. In many respects, it resembled a Carthusian monk, in its full-length gray robe. The cowl was pulled up and forward over the being’s face, so it was fully hidden from Jim. As the ring of light reached what seemed to be some outer perimeter and faded to nothing, the figure slowly turned and raised a hand in greeting to the three Mystères on the screen, who, in turn, bowed with infinite courtesy. The exchange was so mutually respectful that Jim could only assume the salutations were between entities who were acknowledged equals. With the niceties of formal protocol observed, the robed figure shifted its attention to what was going on around it, and actually spoke. To Jim’s complete surprise, the figure’s voice had the carefully trained and modulated tones of an English Shakespearean actor. “Would someone like to explain what exactly is going on here?”

  Jim looked at Doc and Doc looked at Jim, and all of the nuns looked at each other. Since the question had not been specifically directed at anyone in particular, everyone seemed to be wondering who ought to answer and waiting for someone else to step into the breach. For a moment it looked as though Doc was going to make the move. He drew himself up to his full height and coughed once, but before he could utter a word, Semple and Aimee appeared on the terrace. Semple looked more angry and distraught than Jim had ever seen her. She also had a gun in her hand, a small, light-caliber machine pistol that must have been dropped by one of the red nuns. At first sight of the robed figure, she didn’t hesitate. She lifted the pistol and fired a withering, full-auto burst straight at it.

  When Semple saw Anubis’s onetime Dream Warden standing on the scorched earth between the terrace and the lake, all thought and reason left her. She lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger. She didn’t even know if the pistol would fire at all. It might even have been out of ammunition and completely useless. It actually came as a total surprise when the thing roared and bucked in her hand, spraying out the entire contents of the clip in what seemed like little more than a second. She was equally surprised when the burst of fire had no effect whatsoever on its target. With a move so leisurely it could only have been a time distortion, the Dream Warden raised a hand, and a curved, shimmering, bullet-stopping energy field appeared in front of his body. Furious at the ineffectual pointlessness of her reaction, Semple hurled the gun petulantly to the ground, anticipating hideous retribution at any moment. Her third surprise was when the Dream Warden, instead of blasting her to horrible perdition, merely sounded a little disappointed. “Now, is that any way for old acquaintances to greet each other?”

  “Acquaintances ?”

  “We were both at the court of Anubis.”

  “You were the fucking heart of darkness, the evil behind the throne . . . ”

  The Dream Warden sounded quite pleased with himself. “I can pull together rather a good show when I put my mind to it.”

  “A show . . . ?”

  “Couldn’t you tell I was feeding his madness? I like to think that you and I, with a little help from Gojiro, did a reasonably efficient job of getting rid of him and his wretched kingdom.”

  Semple almost pleaded. “Who are you?”

  The Dream Warden sighed. “Oh dear, I suppose it was a mistake to arrive in the Dream Warden drag, but I do rather like the way it stops people from wanting me to do things for them.”

  The Dream Warden unbelted the robe and let it fall to the ground at his feet, and Semple found herself facing a cultivatedly distinguished middle-aged man who greatly resembled the actor Christopher Plummer. He was dressed in an immaculate double-breasted white linen Savile Row suit with every crease as sharp as a knife. An aquamarine shirt with a matching Windsor-knotted tie gave a roguish, almost mobster aspect to the ensemble, although this was offset by a slight femininity of posture. Semple wasn’t sure if he was actually homosexual or merely arrogantly English. A white Persian cat that must have been hidden in the sleeve of the Dream Warden robe scrambled up onto his shoulder and sat staring at Semple with blue eyes that nearly matched the shirt and tie.

  Although this revelation was more than enough to convince Semple that she was in the presence of an entity of great importance and power, she was still without a clue as to who this might be. Jim was looking around curiously; even Aimee herself was totally mystified. The only one who appeared to suspect was Doc, who had an amused smile on his face. It took Mr. Thomas, emerging from where he’d been hiding behind a marble copy of Michelangelo’s David, to effect a less-than-conventional introduction.

  “Don’t you gaggle of fucking idiots know who this is? It’s Him, isn’t it? Yahweh, the Lord God Jehovah, and all of the other Thousand Names. It’s bloody God himself, look you.”

  The voice of a nun came from somewhere at the back of the crowd. “I told you it was God.”

  God made a self-depreciating gesture. “I used to be Allah as well, but we had to subdivide around the twelfth century. The crusades were making us schizophrenic.”

  A number of nuns were already on their knees, and angels and cherubs were starting to gaze with all the adoration that was expected of them. Aimee, on the other hand, wasn’t buying so soon. “You’re really God? Not just another of Semple’s malicious pranks?”

  God sighed. “What did you expect? George Burns?”

  “There’s been a lot of unfortunate confusion here lately.”

  “Surely you don’t want me to prove it to you? I don’t have to walk on the lake or anything, do I?” He noticed Doc Holliday at a distance and nodded with genteel courtesy. “How are you, Dr. Holliday?”

  “I’m feeling pretty well, my Lord. How about your good self?”

  “I fear I may be looking at a few problems here.”

  Aimee stared at Doc. All the color had drained from her face. “He is God.”

  Doc gestured in the affirmative. “The Lord of Hosts and none other.”

  God looked amusedly resentful. “So, Aimee McPherson, you need Doc Holliday to confirm my identity?”

  Not only did Aimee’s color return, but she was rapidly developing the expression of a near-psychotic. “Damn right, I need Doc Holliday to confirm your identity. The last one had a halo and called himself Jesus, but then he turned out to be Ted Bundy. How I am I supposed to tell? When did you ever make thyself beknown to
me? When was I granted the revelation? When did I ever see even one of your faces? I’ve devoted my entire life and hereafter to lauding and magnifying your name, and what have you given me in return? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Not a sign, not a rainbow that I didn’t have to make myself. Not so much as a phone call. You couldn’t even pick up a gold phone and tell me, ‘Keep up the good work, Sister Aimee’? Oh no. That would have been too much effort. And now you’re surprised I don’t immediately recognize you and fall on my face when you show up in your fancy handmade ice-cream suit and your four-hundred-dollar blow-dry haircut. Well, I’m sorry, my Lord, but adoration is supposed to be a two-way street.”

  God gestured to Doc. “You see what I mean? They all expect something from me.”

  Doc demurred. “Fortunately, I have such a bad reputation, few are disappointed at the way I treat them.”

  The Persian cat smiled at Jim. “He’s very good at talking to everyone at once.”

  “I don’t know how He does it.”

  “Well, He’s God, isn’t He?”

  “It all sounds like babble to me.”

  “That’s because you have a poet’s sensibility. Mr. Thomas hears much the same thing. The others all think they’re having a one-on-one with their Creator.”

  “What are they all talking about?”