Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (24 page)

“You should have taken the medical exam,
shouldn’t
you?” The voice was greatly blue-muffled, but he thought it might have been the voice of the doctor alien. It definitely wasn’t Bogart.

“So how long are you going to keep me here?”

Jim was suddenly on a soft padded floor, with a crisscross, nonslip texture. He was starting to realize that if you asked the UFO a question, you had a good chance of receiving an answer, even if it was nothing like the one you were expecting. After checking that he was still intact after the scuffle, that no parts of his body or mind were missing or mysteriously changed, he sat up very carefully, watchful for any fresh surprises. He was sure the extraterrestrials had by no means finished with him yet.

The interior of the chamber in which he found himself was a creation of irregular ovoids. Jim seemed to be in a domed half-ovoid blister or bubble, like an egg cut lengthwise and placed down on the flat cut, creating an ovoid floor about twenty-five feet across at its widest point. Two flat ovoid slabs of some plastic or rubberlike substance were apparently supposed to serve as benches. A much larger slab of the same stuff seemed to be an approximation of a bed. High in the upper dome, a collection of small ovoids floated in eccentric orbit around each other, not unlike the mobiles that had enjoyed a brief vogue on lifeside Earth, except that, where Earth mobiles had used wires and balance beams, this decorative arrangement had no visible means of support.

Even the door or entry port was yet another ovoid, conforming to the curve of the wall at the narrow end of the chamber, though it came with no visible handle, lock, or other external means of operation. Jim got to his feet and decided to conduct an experiment. He walked to the door, placed his hands flat against it, and pushed, gently at first and then applying increasing pressure. No matter how hard he pushed, it neither yielded nor budged. Maybe it wasn’t a
door at all, just a decorative panel set in the wall. If that was the case, though, how did anyone get in and out?

Jim didn’t want to entertain the thought that he was actually sealed in this place, walled up like some futurist heretic. Instead, he took a step back and spoke to what he still thought of as the door. “Open, please?”

Nothing. He tried once more, instructing rather than asking. “Open the door, please.”

Again the result was negative, but Jim couldn’t help smiling at what he was doing. “Open the pod bay door, please, HAL.”

He didn’t really expect a result, and the door didn’t disappoint him. Jim turned away from it and sat down on the ovoid bed to take stock of this new situation. The flat surface yielded just the way a mattress would; at least some consideration had been given to the most basic of his creature comforts. Then again, he was still lacking an ovoid minibar or cocktail cabinet. Creature comfort had its limits.

“Could I get another martini in here?” No dice.

Jim was so focused on wondering what the next alien move might be that the true nature of the room escaped him for quite some time. When it did, though, realization dropped on him like a load of futuristic glass bricks. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s the fucking
Jetsons.”

The aliens had locked him up in a Cadillac construct of 1950s science fiction. What he was coming to think of as his prison was nothing more than a set from one of the better, big-budget, atomic baroque space operas: Forbidden
Planet
or
This Island Earth
. It had to be either a created illusion or a controlled hallucination. He could scarcely believe that actual aliens would subscribe to some retroCaptain Video school of interior design. The obvious scenario was that it had been custom-tailored for him, based on information gleaned directly from his own mind; either he was on the receiving end of another variation of alien rat-maze behaviorist testing, or they were dementedly attempting to put him at his ease.

“I wish this place had a goddamned window.”

Jim all but jumped out of his skin when a large section of wall simply melted away to reveal the black grandeur of the interplanetary starfields in all their celestial glory, with the planet Saturn and its rings dominating the foreground.

“Damn!”

The vision was so extraordinary that a moment of fear stunned him. The flying saucer was disintegrating. It had been struck by a
meteor, blown up by a photon torpedo. Then he realized that he was viewing the raw vacuum of space through a clear viewing port, oval, but as large as the picture window in a suburban split-level.

“Sweet Mary Mother of God.”

Jim’s first glimpse of space from space filled him with a holy awe so total that it rivaled even his earliest acid trips. Tears came to his eyes. It was terrible in its magnificence. The sky was a deeper black than he had ever experienced or imagined. With no atmosphere to act as a distorting filter, the constellations blazed in unwinking brilliance. One of the Saturn’s moons—maybe Titan, Jim didn’t know for sure—was breaking across the giant ringed planet’s horizon. He didn’t care if the whole thing was real or illusion, and he didn’t care what the aliens had in store for him. Whatever they might do, it would be worth it to have seen this.

“Fucking unbelievable.”

All through his life on Earth he had harbored three great irrational regrets. He’d never seen the young Elvis Presley performing live, he was unable to fly like Superman, and he’d never looked into the deep vastness of space. One down and two impossibilities to go. If he hadn’t already been dead, he would probably have been able to die happy. Jim was so transfixed by the infinite beyond the port that he totally failed to hear the ovoid door slide open.

“Hello, Jim.” The first voice was blond, breathless, and afraid of its own power.

“Good evening, Jim.” The second voice was cool, lazily aloof, with a hint of contempt.

Jim quickly turned and was confronted by a spectacle in its own way as wondrous as the view beyond the ovoid picture window.

“I am Epiphany.”

“And I am Devora.”

“Were you admiring the stars, Jim?”

“Now it’s time for you to admire us.”

Jim knew this couldn’t be anything but an elaborate illusion, but in that first moment, he really didn’t care. The 50s sci-fi tableau was now complete. The two women were Wally Wood creations straight from the cover of an EC space comic. Each was at least as tall as he was, perhaps taller, statuesque, each a warrior showgirl in a formfitting fantasy space suit and transparent bubble helmet with articulated hose running to a tiny finned air tank on her back. Epiphany was as blond as she sounded, and her suit was silver accented by a
pale shade of the same blue as the room. Devora was a brunette with honey high-yellow skin, her suit was midnight metalflake with crimson pinstriping. Jim was almost as impressed with the suits as he was with the women. They were fetish feats of bizarre body-shop engineering. The women’s torsos were clad in what looked to be highly polished plastic or fiberglass, with the kind of multicoat, hand-rubbed finish usually saved for top-of-the-line hot rods. Rigidly molded and contoured to the bodies beneath, the detailing went right down to loving re-creations of navels and nipples. Epiphany’s and Devora’s Las Vegas legs were encased in long thigh-length boots with absurdly high heels, their arms sheathed in long evening gloves that came to well above their elbows. Both gloves and boots matched the color of the body units. Their thighs and upper arms, on the other hand, were quite bare, something that, in any real exposure to the vacuum of space, would immediately cause explosive decompression.

Jim knew, however, that these outfits would never be exposed to anything beyond him and this egg-shaped blue room. They had been crafted for his seduction and his seduction alone. He also knew that Epiphany and Devora, these equal and opposite Queens of the Galaxy, nasty and nice, good and evil, were the gift wrapping on some chill alien agenda that, if it had to be so seriously camouflaged, probably would have repulsed him if he’d been forced to witness its unvarnished reality. On the other hand, if the aliens had the decency to run an erotic con on him, he might as well go along with the gag, as long as the gift wrapping held up. He certainly had very little to lose. And so, when Epiphany moved toward him with a demure yet lascivious smile, Devora just one step behind her, Jim returned the smile. When their smiles broadened and their hands went to the throat fastenings of their bubble helmets, he stood his ground. It was only then that he noticed how, although Epiphany was unarmed, Devora wore an unusually phallic art deco ray gun in a low-slung, tied-down, speed-draw gunfighter holster.

“Do the handmaidens have to stay?”

Anubis turned. He’d been absorbed in picking at a tray of crackers and tiny chips of dried fish. It seemed that Anubis did eat constantly.
Maybe it was the dog in him, or perhaps the parents of the mortal child had done something really terrible to him like repeatedly locking him in closets without supper, lunch, or breakfast. As in the Throne Room, a pair of near-naked handmaidens carried the trays of goodies, following the God-King as he moved from one part of the bedroom to another, while two more stood flanking the silk acreage of the dog-god’s bed, waiting on his pleasure.

Anubis regarded Semple disdainfully. “Of course they have to stay; we don’t know when we might require them.”

“And the guards, too?”

“The guards always stay. For all we know, you might be planning an attempt on our life.”

Semple observed that, even in the semi-privacy of his bedroom, Anubis continued to use the royal “We.” The son of a bitch must have been a seriously abused child. Why else would he require such constant reinforcement of his self-esteem? Semple knew that she and Aimee had their problems, but not even the sum of their collective hang-ups could approach Anubis and his monstrous dysfunction.

“As this is our first time together, I might respond better to you if we had a little more privacy?”

The fingers that held the latest cracker halted halfway to the dog-god’s mouth. “Our intention is to fuck you, you stupid woman, not consummate some passionate romance. You will respond just as we want you to respond or you’ll find this interlude will have a very unpleasant aftermath. Besides, we might decide to have one of the handmaidens join us at some point in the proceedings if we’re so inclined.”

Semple caught the two handmaidens beside the bed exchanging weary glances behind Anubis’s back. It was good to see some spark of resistance surviving in this absurd autocracy. She wished she could slip them some sign of sisterly solidarity, but Anubis was looking straight at her. Anubis’s decision of what to do with Semple couldn’t have been more predictable if he’d been wholly dog instead of just dog from the neck up. After an unpleasantly rambling debate with himself regarding Semple’s ultimate fate, complete with a couple of lengthy and loathsomely perverse digressions, Anubis had suddenly declared that he was bored and wished to leave the Throne Room and retire to his private suite. He had risen petulantly and the Nubian guards had fallen in, swiftly and silently, on either side of him. With a curt gesture that Semple should follow, he had walked
quickly to a concealed door behind the right leg of the giant statue. The Dream Warden had attempted to tag along, but Anubis had turned in the doorway and shaken his head. “We won’t be needing you right now. We suggest you busy yourself with that matter we discussed earlier.”

The Dream Warden seemed about to protest, but at a sign from Anubis, the Nubians closed the door on him. Anubis had glanced at Semple and smiled nastily. “The Dream Warden is not happy. We had halfway promised you to him, but then we changed our mind and decided, for the moment, to keep you for ourself. You should feel honored. Our whims are not always so charitable.”

“I am honored, my lord.”

Anubis’s eyes flashed with amusement. “Learning submission, are you, Semple McPherson?”

No, dogbreath, I’m just a poor girl doing her level best to survive in an untenable situation.

“I’m attempting to please, my lord.”

“You wouldn’t have preferred the Dream Warden?”

She smiled nicely. “How could anything be preferable to being noticed by you, my lord?”

Anubis had then switched position like a spoiled child. “Are you saying that you have something against our Dream Warden? That you’re maybe too good for him?”

Semple sighed inwardly. Don’t you ever give it a rest, Benji? “How can I say, my lord? All I’ve seen is a figure in a robe.”

“And you don’t want to see what’s beneath that robe, believe us. It’s disgusting.”