Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (26 page)

Semple felt as though her spine were going to snap, her brain boil out through her eyes. She was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, she was in another place, with another person, a man, indistinct but definitely a man. His hair was shoulder-length and dark, but his features kept shifting, like the indefinable face in an elusive dream. And they were together, with a power passing between them though neither of them knew why.

Jim was in the arms of the Queen of the Nile, black ringleted hair billowing around him, kohl-rimmed eyes gazed into his. She gripped him with a terrible urgency, as though she knew they had encountered each other in a transitory place that could only be the result of a glitch in the cosmic flow; in a nanosecond, he knew they would be parted. She pressed her mouth against his in simultaneous welcome and farewell. Then Jim was falling. Multiple orgasms of a kind that he had never experienced before were ripping through him. And he was once again falling.

Semple was screaming. Multiple orgasms were ripping through her. And he was screaming. And she was screaming.

A
s Jim hit slimy water with a splash and sank, he had a fleeting glimpse of the UFO above him. It was already nothing more than a tight cluster of colored lights in the sky, zigzagging away on an erratic and illogical course and vanishing into a gray overcast, just like they did in all the sighting stories and blurry handheld camcorder tapes. For an instant, he was filled with a burning if illogical outrage. He’d been used like the proverbial one-night stand, the universal tramp. He didn’t even qualify as an intergalactic whore: to the best of his knowledge, he’d received absolutely nothing in return for the bodily invasion except a residual burning in his rectum and the feeling that he had been victimized. As far as could tell, he’d been dropped from a chute in the underside of the saucer, dumped out like garbage, without so much as even the parting acknowledgment of metaphoric cab fare.

As he sank, his mouth, nose, and ears filled with slime, duckweed, and swamp water, and resentment gave way to the urgent necessities of survival. Jim hit bottom, or at least hit mud. He floundered up again, stumbling, splashing, drenched, with his previous fury returning. Not only had he been discarded and disrespected by the fucking aliens, but something magical had been interrupted by his fall. He didn’t even have a clear memory of what had happened. All he knew was that it had been important and now it was gone. A new and mysterious cake, not simply left out in the rain, but hit by a monsoon, the recipe irretrievable. A woman with dark Cleopatra hair hovered at the core of the fragmenting memory, but already he
could no longer picture her. The drapes of perception were rapidly closing, like the falling curtains of dreamwaking.

Gasping, treading water, getting himself covered in mud, he discovered that the water in which he was struggling was actually only chest deep. At the same time he also heard a voice. “Over here, pal. There’s a few square yards of dry land where I am. I don’t know what good it’ll do you, but you’re welcome to join me.”

The voice was not unlike that of a frog in an animated cartoon. A cockney frog, to boot, with vowels decidedly British, and the kind of epicene vocal droop affected by Mick Jagger in his speaking voice. The frog, if indeed it was a frog, sounded dense but trustworthy, and for want of a better offer, Jim waded laboriously in the direction of the voice.

“Say something else, will you? So I can get my bearings?”

“Tossed from a flying saucer, were you? Give you the treatment and then heave-ho you into the swamp, did they? Those fucking aliens have a lot of fucking nerve, I’m telling you.”

Jim was now only up to his waist in water, pushing through the thick reed beds that flourished in the shallows. It was hard to see. The swamp was heavily shrouded in a gray drifting mist. The Anglo-frog seemed be leading him in the right direction, but he needed to keep it talking. “You get a lot of folks ejected from UFOs around here?”

The frog voice was blasé. “Happens all the time.”

“All the time?”

“Maybe not all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. Local speculation has it that the aliens have this thing about the Jurassic. Maybe something to do with the Nemesis Asteroid.”

Now Jim was totally confused. “The Jurassic?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re saying this is the Jurassic?”

The frog voice croaked, perhaps to clear its throat. “Or a loving reconstruction of same.”

Jim halted in his squelching tracks. “Get the fuck outta here.”

“Surprised? Most folks are when they first fall out of the UFO.”

“I’m in the Jurassic era?”

“You’re in the Jurassic.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, my old son. Plus there’s not very much you can do about it apart from trying to avoid being
eaten. Bit of a difference in the old food chain back here. I can understand your confusion, though; it must be hard to go from Master of the Universe to a snack on legs.”

As if in confirmation of the point, the mist temporarily parted and a huge form became visible in the distance. It stood well over fifty feet tall, with a long serpentine neck and tail, a hunched body like a small hill, and a mud-caked hide wrinkled green and brown, with markings not unlike jungle camouflage. It stood grazing on the top foliage of a medium-sized tree, and even its slightest movement caused twenty inches of oily swell to roll across the swamp, threatening Jim with inundation. Jim Morrison stood frozen by the sight of his first live dinosaur. Suddenly he wished he’d never been so rash as to call himself the Lizard King. In terms of monarchy, this beast had him. Jim wasn’t sure if it was a brontosaurus or a diplodocus. He had always confused the two. The frog voice piped up helpfully. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, pal. Strictly herbivorous.”

Jim became defensive. “I knew that.”

“Sure you did.”

At that moment, the creature raised its tiny head and never-ending neck to the sky and emitted a wailing but strangely harmonic cry, something between the call of the humpback whale and a mournful foghorn. It was immediately answered by similar calls from elsewhere in the swamp.

“They do like to sing of an evening.”

Even though Jim was fairly certain that the frog voice—and the human archaeologists of his own time—were correct in believing that such dinosaurs were harmless, he stood and waited for the giant beast to finish its song before resuming his struggle to dry ground. He recalled that a raging bull was also technically a herbivore, and he certainly had no idea what kind of red rag it might take to raise the ire of a diplodocus.

“Makes you nervous, does she?”

“Anything a few thousand times my size makes me nervous.”

Jim was now wading out of the swamp toward an area of coarse grass hummocks and tortured willows a few poor inches above the general water level. The mist was more patchy on this marginally higher ground, and off in the far distance he could see a dense plume of smoke rising from what he took to be an active volcano. He really did seem to be in some young Jurassic world. He looked around for
the source of the frog voice, but could see nothing that qualified. “So where are you, friend?”

“I’m over here, aren’t I?”

The voice was coming from a tall clump of vegetation that ran rampant between two willows. The plant or plants were like nothing that Jim had ever seen before. Three elongated, open top gourds stood together in the middle of a base of fleshy green and yellow leaves, and a long, whiplike tendril extended from the mouth of each gourd. Jim could still, however, see no sign of the frog or any other creature from which the voice might emanate.

“Why don’t you show yourself?”

“You’re looking straight at me. I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”

Jim noticed that, each time the voice spoke, the lower leaves of the plant rubbed against the gourds in exact time to the words. A look of incredulity came over Jim’s face. “You’re the plant?”

“Why shouldn’t I be a plant?”

It was a reasonable question, and all Jim could do was shrug. “No reason, I guess. I just never met a plant that talked before. Also you sounded so much like a frog.”

“It puts the real frogs at their ease before I eat them. It gives them the illusion they’re dealing with one of their own.”

“You eat frogs?”

“Never met a plant that ate meat before?”

Jim nodded. “Sure. I had a Venus’s-flytrap when I was a kid, but—”

“Strictly small-time.”

“Are you telling me you’re a carnivorous plant?”

“You have a problem with that? A vegetarian or something? I have to tell you, vegetarianism looks very different from my perspective.”

Jim took a step back. “I’m not a vegetarian.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Jim took another step back. “But how do I know you’re not going to eat me?”

One of the tendrils made a gesture as though such a suggestion was close to insulting. “You really think I’d eat someone with whom I had just been talking?”

“You talk to the frogs before you eat them. You just told me that yourself.”

“Yes, but you’re not a frog, are you?”

“That’s true.”

“So come closer and tell me all about your adventures with the aliens.”

Jim didn’t move. “I think I’ll just stay where I am for the moment.”

The tendril stiffened as though offended. “You don’t trust me?”

Jim drew himself up to his full height and adopted a cool pedantic tone. “I seem to recall that most carnivorous plants I ever heard about feed by luring their prey into reach, either by the enticement of scent or color or by some kind of sugar excretion.”

“You think I’m trying to lure you to your doom with witty and urbane conversation?”

Jim nodded. “It’s a possibility I have to consider. I mean, you can hardly blame me for being cautious, can you? I may not be a frog, but I’m just as edible. More so, in fact, considering I’m larger. You’d be happily digesting me for a week.”

The plant sounded offended. “That does rather put me in the same class as tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Believe me. If I saw a tyrannosaurus rex, I’d run like hell regardless of what it might say to me.”

The tendril made a limp curling gesture; Jim would have sworn the plant was pouting. For such a rudimentary limb, it was able to manage a high degree of expression. “I have to tell you that your suspicion makes me very unhappy. Especially after I helped you find your way out of the swamp and onto dry land.”

As guilt trips went, this was pretty effective. Jim almost felt compelled to approach the plant as a sign of trust. Before he could take the first step, though, another voice came from behind him. “Don’t believe a word it’s saying. That overgrown weed is a consummate con artist. It’s been trying to get me for years.”

The voice came from a small mammal, about the size of a raccoon, that sat on its hind legs on one of the tussocks of coarse swamp grass. The creature resembled a lumpy combination of hamster, prairie dog, and potbellied pig. Jim looked down at the little animal. “You really think he’s going to eat me?”

The animal nodded. “If he gets half a chance. He’s trying to sucker you in with that phony Brit accent. He wants everyone to feel sorry for him, but the truth is, he’s like all the rest of us here, except the dinosaurs—another dead asshole one jump ahead of a bad reincarnation. I mean, take me, for example. My species doesn’t even have a name. Nobody ever found so much as a fucking fossil’s worth of us.”