Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (22 page)

Shortly after she had split with her sibling, Semple had developed the unconscious and annoying habit of compulsively judging her actions against those of the characters in old Joan Collins movies. Obviously she was looking for a way to distinguish herself as the antithesis of Aimee’s milksop blond purity. The problem stemmed from the time, before the split, when she was still working on her new physical persona. In the course of building her image, she had done an extensive study of Collins, starting with Dynasty and working backward all the way to the actress’s low-budget, British errant-teen roles in movies like
The Good Die Young
. Right after the split, her studies had meshed with the insecurity of being on her own for the first time, and she found herself hardly able to make a move unless she could relate it to a Joan Collins movie. It was almost as though she were using the actress as a sibling surrogate or an invisible friend. Semple had, of course, rigorously trained herself out of the habit, and kept the lapse a close secret ever after. When it suddenly resumed its grip on her as she entered the Throne Room of Anubis, she half concluded that it was due to the stress to which she had been subjected since her arrival in Necropolis. Whatever the reason, from the moment she entered the Throne Room, she couldn’t help but think of herself as being on the Cinemascope set of
Land of the Pharaohs
.

The rest of Necropolis may have been threadbare and stain-encrusted, but the Palace of Anubis verged on the preposterous in its ancient Egyptian splendor. The color scheme in the Throne Room was turquoise and gold, and the spatial proportions were indisputably epic. As far as Semple could tell, the Throne Room was used by Anubis only for the receiving and overwhelming of guests and deputations from his subject population, but it was the size of at least two basketball courts, divided by twin rows of massive fluted pillars that held up a forty-foot-high ceiling. The walls were decorated
with towering murals of gods and demons, all clearly designed to demonstrate Anubis’s dominant role, mentally, physically, and sexually, in the pantheon.

Semple had been instructed to enter the Throne Room through the massive gold double doors that stood at the opposite end of the vast space from the throne itself. As a new arrival, she would come out onto a raised platform and walk down a wide flight of stairs to the main floor. She had been told to wait on the platform, and not descend until Anubis indicated that he wished her to approach. When the signal came, she should go down the stairs and commence the trek of fifty yards or more to the throne. Had Semple not long since convinced herself of her own fabulousness, she might have been overawed by it all.

The preparation for her encounter with Anubis had been even more elaborate than her trials on the Fat Ari show. Under different circumstances, she might have been exhausted by such pampering twice in one day, but the perfection of the finished product made it tolerable if not actually enjoyable. The jackal head might have the direst plans for her, but at least they would be executed in luxury. By this point, Semple was also feeling lucky. Anubis might be steamrollering the Afterlife in the trappings of the god, but she knew that, somewhere, buried deep within him, lurked a stunted and highly insecure human male. For Semple, the manipulation of human males had never presented a problem. Given time, she would have him doing exactly what she wanted.

The prepping for the audience had started with a second full-body scrub and cosmetic makeover. Apparently what had been good enough for Fat Ari’s camera’s hardly made it at the court of the god-king. It wouldn’t have been fair to describe the handmaidens who performed the task as more skilled than Fat Ari’s crew. It was like the difference between Belgian lacemakers and New York garment workers. The handmaidens of Anubis worked in total reverent silence, as though they were embroidering the Bayeaux Tapestry or illuminating holy manuscripts. Given a choice, she would rather have had the constant coarse and caustic dialogue at Fat Ari’s, but she had no complaints with the work of the handmaidens. Fat Ari’s crew had made her lewd and salable, but the handmaidens were making her exquisite.

The makeup artists were followed by the dressers. The costume
chosen for Semple was hardly elaborate, a very up-market variation on the standard wraparound skirt, though it came with a highly Egyptienne hawk-wing cape, with wide, built-up shoulders and a pinion motif. It was the precision of its tailoring and the quality of the fabric that truly impressed her. The metallic red, green, and gold shot-silk mixture shimmered and undulated as she moved, like the hot skin of some fantastic molten reptile.

Before she was let loose on Anubis, Zipporah, the primary concubine, a midperiod Catherine Deneuve who ruled the god-king’s seraglio with the iron will of an Afterlife Margaret Thatcher, had instructed her in the correct manner in which to approach their glorious leader for the first time. The short lecture was delivered as a formal, almost theological speech, which seemed only fitting if dealing with a god. At the end, however, as the woman put particular emphasis on how Semple should never, under any circumstances, contradict or disagree with their lord, Semple made a mental note that, as soon as she resolved the questions of her own status and survival, she’d find a way to cut this fool deity down to size.

The gold doors that led to the Throne Room were flanked by a pair of muscular and heavily oiled Nubian guards. Semple had been escorted that far by a retinue of handmaidens, but as they approached the guarded doors the handmaidens halted and Semple was allowed to go on alone. The guards were identical in every respect, as though they had been assembled on the same production line. They stood over seven feet tall, with shaved and shined heads, clad in brief military kilts that left nothing to the imagination. Armed with long gold scimitars, they stared straight ahead, unwavering and not acknowledging Semple in any way as she walked toward them. Zipporah had said nothing about the guards, but Semple, although sorely tempted, refrained from ogling them. Without so much as a lingering sideways glance, she walked through the gold doors and out onto the platform at the head of the stairs, and was treated to her first glimpse of Anubis.

What confronted her, in fact, was not one but two versions of the god, Anubis in the flesh and also a giant sculpted likeness. Anubis himself sat in the Mighty Throne of the God, and the Mighty Throne of the God stood on an elevated dais between the massive feet of a ceiling-high statue of himself hewn from polished black volcanic rock and highlighted with flourishes of gold and precious stones. Lit from below by recessed banks of constantly moving spotlights,
the glowering statue sat four-square and formal in its own sculpted throne, arms crossed across its chest, stone hands gripping the traditional power symbols of the reaping hook and flail. In total contrast, the real Anubis sprawled in his throne, studiedly decadent, with one long bronzed leg cocked over the armrest. Like the statue above him, the live Anubis was arrayed in gold. A short gold kilt was wrapped around his hips; a massive, beaten-gold collar was draped around his neck and extended clear to his navel.

To say that Anubis was well built was an almost ridiculous understatement. The human body of Anubis was the buffed peak of iron-pumping perfection, although Semple seriously doubted that the god ever did anything as gauche as actually pump iron. Even seen from a distance, his divine muscle definition was clear beneath a skin that was the color of oil-dark antique leather. Semple couldn’t exactly estimate his height while he sat, but she imagined that, like his Nubians, he was well in excess of seven feet tall. What surprised Semple, even as accustomed as she was to bizarre Afterlife fantasy fulfillments, was the way his jackal head was married to the human body. The only slightly ambiguous feature was the god’s rather odd conical neck, but his advanced physique seemed more than adequate to support it.

As Semple might have expected, the god was not alone in his Throne Room. Two more Nubian guards stood on either side of him with grim expressions and scimitars across their chests. Three near-naked handmaidens sat at his feet, pouring his wine, caressing his legs, and offering him gold platters of exotic finger foods. The guards and the girls conformed exactly to formula. The final figure in the tableau at the far end of the Throne Room was a lot less predictable. It looked like a Carthusian monk in its full-length robe. The cowl was pulled forward so the face was hidden, and the figure filled Semple with a sudden unease. The shadowy being remained out of the halo of light around Anubis, keeping him- or herself half in the shadows behind the throne. Semple could only assume that this was the classic gray eminence, the all-powerful, whispering advisor who had the ear of the despot, and the capacity to make or break rivals and lesser mortals. Semple knew from both experience and history that such individuals could be deeply and fundamentally dangerous.

Even as these thoughts were going through her mind, the figure in gray leaned forward and spoke into the god’s ear. Anubis’s head turned sharply and he looked in Semple’s direction with the suddenness
of a predatory bird. As the self-created god stared at her, a spring of healthy subversion bubbled up inside her, in the form of an urgent and almost overwhelming need to giggle. Something about Anubis had suggested the kind of absurdist, devastatingly funny idea that comes with prolonged anxiety and fear. From certain angles, Anubis, with his pointed, erect ears, looked like Batman with a grafted-on canine muzzle. Semple had suddenly seen Anubis as nothing more than a composite of the Caped Crusader and a cartoon dog. Then Anubis gestured in her direction, and the comic vision fled. The voice was, if anything, even more overpowering in the flesh than it had been when she had heard it over the speakers of the computer in the doctor’s office. “Semple McPherson, you will now approach us.”

Semple took a deep breath, straightened her back, and started down the steps, doing her best to look as impressive and dignified as possible. Joan Collins would have been proud of her. It was only as she was halfway across the vast expanse of pristine marble that she remembered how, in Land
of the Pharaohs
, Joan Collins had been tied to a pillar and flogged—then buried alive at the end of the movie.

Without thinking, Jim grabbed the arm of the nearest little creature and swung it as hard as he could at the Bogart alien. From that first moment of action everything seemed to run in slow motion. Jim was amazed at how light the alien was. He was able to pick it up as easily as a Styrofoam doll, something he would never have been able to do with a human child of comparable size. “That’s right, you little gray sons of bitches! Run away! Get the hell away, you big-eyed cock-suckers! You’ve got a fighting-mad human on your hands now. I’m not one of your shell-shocked abductees! I’m a real representative specimen. One of the badass monkey tribe. All we had to do was invent fire and the fulcrum and there was no holding us. We pretty much fucked up our entire planet, so it shouldn’t be so hard to fuck up a few of you!”

Jim turned. What he needed was a weapon. All rational moderation had left him. He didn’t care that he’d come aboard the spacecraft of his own accord. He didn’t see how that gave the aliens any reason to assume they could interfere with him in any way they
wanted. The fact that doing random damage in a UFO in flight might have been a suicidal act also didn’t bother him. Hadn’t he, when drunk, bored, and self-destructive, tried to open the emergency door of a Pan Am DC9 somewhere over the Rockies, in flight between Los Angeles and Chicago? For the satisfaction he’d gain from devastating the saucer, he was, at that moment, quite prepared to go back to the pods of the Great Double Helix.

The Bogart alien was down, pinned under the arms and legs of the creature that Jim had used as a missile. Jim started toward the operating table. Somewhere amid the trays of surgical instruments, he ought to be able to find a decent weapon. He spotted an object about ten inches long that looked like a bone saw, seized it, and turned, ready to fight to the finish. The bad news was that, as far as Jim was concerned, the finish had come. Bogart had disentangled himself from the other two and was crouched on his knees, holding the strange cylindrical weapon in a very businesslike, two-handed grip.

Only rage prevented Jim from realizing that he didn’t have a chance. If he’d had any sense he would have dropped the saw and given up. Instead, he rushed straight at the alien with the weapon. The flash of its discharge totally blinded him. He could feel nothing, so he didn’t know if he was still on his feet or not. All he could see was an unrelieved vibrant blue, and that was all Jim Morrison wrote.