Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (10 page)

After that, Jim found himself at a stoned loss for words. There was really nothing to say, and for long minutes the two men sat in silence until Saladeen spoke again. “He was here for a while, you know?”

“Who was?”

“Lee Oswald.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I swear. A wandering soul wandering through. He was calling himself Harvey Hydell, and he’d taken on the physical form of Leon Trotsky, but most everyone knew. And those that didn’t figured it out in time.”

“Leon Trotsky? Are you jerking me around?”

Saladeen looked angry. “Leon fucking Trotsky. Leader of the motherfucker Red Army, purged by Stalin, assassinated 1940, Mexico City. What’s the matter, jerkoff? You think I don’t know what Leon Trotsky look like? You think I’m stupid or something?”

Jim held up a hand. “Just slow down here, okay? Don’t get so fucking hair-trigger on me. I was just thinking what a weird choice it was to look like Leon Trotsky. I mean, those fucking glasses and the beard and the sticking-up hair. Jesus Christ.”

Saladeen shrugged. “I guess the motherfucker wasn’t aiming for handsome. You know what I mean? Being a paradox wrapped in an enigma got to be some burden to bear. Can’t leave you too much time to be doing handsome, yo?”

After Saladeen’s sudden flash of temper, Jim thoroughly expected him to get up and take his leave after this statement, but the big man surprised Jim by remaining exactly where he was. He didn’t speak for a while and then he grinned sheepishly. “Listen, I—”

Jim shook his head. “No big thing.”

Saladeen turned away, staring off down the street and across the desert. “I guess I still ain’t gotten over being mad at—” He abruptly stopped and his back stiffened. “Uh-oh.”

Jim quickly turned. “What?”

“Uh-oh.”

This second uh-oh was one of the least encouraging uh-ohs that Jim ever remembered hearing. Saladeen continued to peer out into the desert. “I think we may have a problem yonder.”

Jim looked where he was looking. A bright blue-white light was zigzagging across the desert, laid low to the ground but, as far as Jim could tell, making for the town. Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What is that?”

Saladeen ignored him as he watched the light. It seemed to be coming nearer. He cursed slowly under his breath. “Shee-it.”

Jim was starting to become a little alarmed. “So what is it?”

Saladeen scowled. “It could be anything. There’s always lights buzzing about in the desert. Could just be random leak-through. Or it could be a harbinger.”

“A harbinger of what?”

Saladeen’s scowled deepened. “That’s always the tricky part with harbingers.”

The hard, rocky, and already uneven ground of Golgotha was now so littered with human skulls and bones that it was all but impossible to walk without crunching them underfoot. Semple’s high heels constantly threatened to twist out from under her, and she was beginning to profoundly regret that she had insisted that the meeting be held in this accursed place. To deliberately irritate Aimee, Semple had chosen a suit in guardsman red, an eighties-style Dynasty-retro number with a short and very tight skirt and a flounced jacket with enormous shoulders. The ensemble was completed by matching pillbox hat and veil, and the already-mentioned shoes with their impractical heels. Aimee, on the other hand, had dressed in blue for their meeting, pumping her image of innocence and purity on this occasion with shades of the Virgin Mary. She even had a faint rainbow halo hovering above her head. Aimee definitely seemed to be in the process of making the transition from the loyally devout to the independently divine; plus the simple fact of having been organized enough to arrive first allowed her to establish her high ground and spare herself the need to stumble over the strewn bones in front of an audience. In this respect, Semple had definitely been aced out in the current round of the struggle.

Prior to the complete separation of herself and Aimee, the fiction had always been that the horror landscape of Golgotha was a creation of Semple’s. She was the dark half. Who else could bring into being such a vivid tableau of desolation, suffering, and mortal misery? Semple, however, had repeatedly denied this. She had no memory of doing any such thing. Certainly, the necessary evil lurked in her heart, but the grisly brutality of Golgotha, with its multiple crucifixions and its stark, wind-scorched terrain, just wasn’t Semple’s style. Golgotha was primitive, stinking, and foul, and her signature wasn’t on any part of it.

After a long time, Aimee had all but managed to convince her that she must have brought the ghastly location into being quite unconsciously, in a dream or when she was occupied with something else. Aimee had reasoned that it must be the product of a deeply buried nastiness from the lower murk of Semple’s tainted psyche. It was only after the separation had become absolute, and Golgotha had not only remained but also extended itself, that the truth had finally to be faced. Golgotha had nothing to do with Semple. It had grown and continued to grow from some flaw of corruption in Aimee’s soul. Semple might be the dark half, but Aimee wasn’t without her own secret reservoirs of shadow. From Semple’s perspective, the only disturbing factor in the revelation was that, if Aimee wasn’t as pristine and perfect as she pretended, it might also indicate that Semple herself wasn’t all bad. At some point in the future, an unanticipated inner virtue might rise up and betray her at the worst possible moment.

Once the truth was out, Semple had taken every opportunity to remind Aimee of the embarrassing fact that Golgotha was entirely hers. That was why Semple had insisted that they meet there, but now it looked as if instead of Semple rubbing Aimee’s nose in the wart on her psyche, she was about to twist, distastrously, one or both of her own ankles. Semple’s scarlet alligator spike crunched down on a partial human rib cage and she stumbled badly. She had to take three quick steps sideways to avoid falling, while, to her total chagrin, Aimee watched with an amused smile and the crew of nuns that flanked her hid their faces in the wimples of their white habits and tittered behind their hands.

“Are you drunk, sibling dear?”

Semple regained her balance and glared at her sister. “No, I’m not drunk. It’s becoming impossible to walk in this place. Couldn’t
you have someone clean it up? Or at least clear some paths through the bones?”

“Perhaps it’s the extreme impracticality of your footwear?”

This remark drew a fresh burst of smothered sniggering from the nuns, and Semple wished that she had the time to create a dozen or so Mongol tribesmen or Russian soldiers from World War II. They would make short work of those bitches. “If you have to have this accursed place, you could at least make some effort to maintain it. If they aren’t cleared out soon, the damned bones will start piling up in drifts. Where do you think you are? Pol Pot’s Cambodia?”

Aimee glanced at one of the nuns. “Make a note, my dear. The Place of Skulls needs to be tidied up.”

The nun nodded and produced a small notebook and silver pencil to take down the memo. Semple had heard that both the retinue of nuns and also the gaggle of women dressed in torn and filthy sackcloth, the ones with the wild hair and mad staring eyes, who clustered at the foot of the crosses watching the agonies of the gasping, groaning victims with ugly relish, had previously worked as prostitutes in the notorious ectosector of the degenerate ex-dentist and hired killer called John Holliday. They were, however, a recent addition to Aimee’s human menagerie, arriving well after Semple had gone her own way, so she could not be completely sure of the story’s veracity.

Aimee turned her attention back to Semple. “Why don’t you come closer, my dear?”

Semple shook her head. “I think I’ll stay right here.” Another attempt to stumble across the field of dry bones would only risk further humiliation and even injury.

Aimee smiled indulgently. “So have you decided to find me my poet?”

Semple nodded. “Yes, I have.”

Aimee looked surprised. “Just like that? No conditions? No discussion? No negotiating points?”

“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”

Now the two sisters faced each other across a space of about fifteen feet. All around them, a forest of crosses, some empty, some bearing a roped and nailed occupant, reared against the angry red sky and the roiling purple clouds like diseased and leafless trees. Since they were already dead, the victims of Golgotha never actually died, but at some point in their torture, often after a number of
days of excruciating pain, they simply vanished. The suffering became too much for them and they vibrated out and took the wind route back to the pod. The strange part of it all was that no real reason existed for these individuals to suffer at all. In theory, they could have made their exit before they even reached the cross, or the first nail was driven into their feet or hands. The obvious inference was that those who went along with their own quasi-executions were either advanced masochists, guilt-racked religious fanatics, or insanely locked into the fantasy.

Another peculiar consideration was that the majority of those who underwent crucifixion were genuine entities and not Aimee’s tame creations. The unfortunates were drawn from the numbers of odd spirits who had trouble assuming an identity and personality of their own in the Afterlife and gravitated to the constructs of others, in this case Aimee’s personal Heaven. By far the greater percentage of these sad arrivals caused no problems in Heaven, blending easily with the manufactured angels and cherubs. The victims on the crosses—all but a couple of exceptions of the male gender—must have transgressed in some way and were paying the price. Semple understood that the malefactors and heretics were usually fingered by one or another of the ex-prostitute nuns, who had the dual function of acting as Aimee’s spy net and ideological secret police. As the saying went, there was nothing more righteously vindictive than a reformed whore. The only thing that remained a total mystery to Semple was where the constantly increasing numbers of bones were coming from.

Aimee, having arranged to be slightly farther up the sere, central hill of Golgotha, was able to talk down to her sister with a far-fromwarranted superiority. “So when do you intend starting out on your quest?”

“I thought I’d go right now.”

Aimee looked surprised. “Right now?”

Semple nodded. “That’s right. Unless you can think of any reason to delay.”

“I can think of none. Where are you intending to commence your search?”

“I was going to travel directly to Necropolis.”

Aimee frowned. “Necropolis? Is that wise?”

“It’s the closest confluence.”

“Necropolis is an evil place. Old and evil and made worse by the
passage of time. I heard there were over a million souls there, all subject to the will of one being who claims to be the god Anubis and is reputed to be the personification of iniquity.”

Semple smiled annoyingly. “I thought it would be my kind of place.”

“You could encounter many strange things in Necropolis.”

A troop of small black monkeys with bald white faces like little old men was rooting through the litter of bones and tossing them around as though attempting a miniature re-creation of the prologue of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. At the mention of the word “Necropolis,” however, they stopped what they were doing and appeared to settle down to listen to the conversation. Semple noted that animals and birds were a new addition, and wondered what fresh weirdness might be eating at the underside of her sister’s mind. Along with the monkeys, a flock of vultures flapped and squabbled between the crosses, rats scurried through the lower levels of the bone piles, and skinny yellow dogs snarled and scavenged. “Like it’s so totally normal around here?”

“Don’t take Anubis too lightly. I understand he runs a brutally sophisticated police state.”

Semple glanced at Aimee’s gang of nuns but didn’t comment on their homegrown secret-police tactics. “I have quite a rep as a funster myself. I don’t see why I should be afraid of any jackal-headed Egyptian death god. Besides, he’s almost certain to be a phony.”

“Phony or not, I’ve also heard he encourages cannibalism.”

Semple looked hard at her sister. The monkeys continued to watch intently. “Does something about my leaving worry you? Are you trying to put me off?”

“Of course not. Why should it?” Once again Aimee’s answer wasn’t ringing true. “Are you concerned that putting distance between us will create some kind of problem?”