Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (46 page)

When Moses had demanded she tell him what course to set for the first leg of the supposed long march to the Promised Land, she had scanned the horizon for a while, finally selecting a broken-looking volcanic mountain. “There.”

Moses had squinted into the bright distance. “Where?”

“That mountain that looks like a cat on its back. Head directly for that. When we get there, I’ll give you another bearing.”

Moses had looked at her doubtfully, but camels were nearby and he kept his voice low. “Are you certain?”

Semple had put on an aggrieved face. “Of course I’m certain. It’s where I come from, isn’t it?”

“You know the consequences if you’re giving me a bum steer.”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Just reminding you.”

“Then please don’t. This isn’t easy and I don’t navigate well under pressure. Just head for that mountain.”

Semple may have pointed the way, but that still didn’t mean the tribe came any closer to getting itself on the move. After a further half hour, it was beginning to look to Semple as though the Children of Israel were never going to move at all. Then the vanguard, which consisted of some hundred or so black-faced sheep and an escort
of swarthy herders, actually began to head slowly out of what had been the campsite and into the open desert. Walking point, in front of both men and beasts, was a gnarled old ram with china eyes and curling yellow misshapen horns. Semple wondered what he might have been in a previous life.

Ultimately the entire tribe was on the move. Semple had to admit that they did have a certain slow, unkempt grandeur; their sheer size seemed to consume the desert physically as they made their way across it. Lumpen and ignorant they might be, hag-ridden by superstition and further confused by the arbitrary and often contradictory teachings of Moses, she nevertheless had to concede that they had a determination that bordered on awesome. They toted their babies and lifted their bales; hauled their carts and shepherded their sheep; raised the desert dust with the slow, measuredly resigned slap of their sandals; all with a dull, unquestioning, and infinitely patient optimism that, someday, in some way, the Promised Land would arrive as promised, the milk and honey would flow, and all their trials, Lord, would finally be over. And all the time, relentlessly plodding, one hoof in front of the other, the ram with the malformed horns led them. It made Semple almost sad to know that their beliefs were so cruelly unfounded.

Semple had actually expected Moses himself to be leading the migration. At the very least, being up front kept one out of the worst of the dust. She was mildly surprised when it turned out that he took a position a dozen or more ranks from the front, in the very center of the column. It made a kind of military sense, giving him a considerable shield of cannon fodder should the column be attacked. What she couldn’t imagine was what or who might attack such a large mass of people in a desert that was apparently devoid of all other life.

After a while, however, Semple found that she had to start revising her ideas. Maybe the dry, blistering terrain of scrub, thorn, and dirty sand wasn’t as devoid as she had initially imagined. The first indication was a wrecked gas station. The place looked as though it had been ripped apart by one or more huge mechanical grapples, and very recently, too, if the freshness of the breaks in the wood was any guide. When she first spotted the fallen Exxon sign, the shattered pumps, the flattened and compacted Coke machine, Semple had looked quickly at Moses. She was about to say something, but from the look of him, leaning lightly on his staff and gazing straight
ahead, she knew instinctively that for him the place didn’t exist. She turned to see if any of the others were aware of the destroyed facility, but their faces were as blank as ever and they, too, seemed completely oblivious to it. Semple was the only one seeing it; and she decided, until she could figure out what was going on, it was best to keep her mouth shut.

The next oddity proved to be a drive-in movie theater, long abandoned, slowly ground down by wind and sand. A lopsided marquee showed that its last presentation had been a double feature of
Ocean’s Eleven
and A
Hole in the Head
. A large hole had been punched in the center of the otherwise intact screen, as though something fantastic had not taken kindly to the work of Frank Sinatra. Once again, Moses and his people showed no sign of being aware of it, just as they didn’t, about a half hour later, see the overturned Packard sedan. The automobile lay on its side, bodywork ripped as though by some huge gouging tool, possibly the same entity that had totaled the gas station. Like the gas station, the destruction of the car looked to be a fairly recent event. Its paint was unblemished, the raw metal of its wounds still bright and uncorroded.

Semple plodded on, pondering this discrepancy in perception, even toying with a vague hope that she was leading them into some kind of reality shift in which she might vanish herself, never to see Moses or his wretched congregation again. Stranger things did occur in the netherworld and she sure as shit was due for some kind of break. It was just as she was allowing herself this faint hope of a paranormal escape window when the ram halted in its tracks.

The ram with the malformed horns stopped and stood looking around uneasily. The next moment the earth trembled with a set of measured, even shocks, about two seconds apart. The tribe stopped dead, a common fear falling on each and every one. The Children of Israel stood, eyes wide, not daring to speak. Babies and sheep alike quieted themselves. And then the air was split by a raucous, grating scream, distant but still deafening.

“Ggggaaaawwwwwwwurrrurr!”

A corresponding murmur of pure terror ran through the crowd. At first it was just a whisper, but it rapidly rose to a crescendo of panic. “The Beast! The Beast! The Beast is come! God save us, the Beast is come!”

Semple looked at Moses and saw, to her consternation, that he was as mortally afraid as the humblest goatherd.

T
he mouth of the tunnel itself was sneeringly anthropomorphic, a vast misshapen maw like a twisted grin of sculpted triumph, with the half-lowered spikes of a giant steel portcullis substituting for jagged predator fangs. Jim, however, was too far gone. He sat slumped in the stern of the launch, drinking so hard and fast that the movement of the bottle to his mouth had taken on a steady rhythm. Not even the booze, though, could stop his mind from screaming. It was just his body that was in collapse. Had there been a moon, his brain would have upped and bayed at it. As it was, his simian mind gnawed at the wire of its cage, and its reptilian base consciousness tried desperately to recall the chameleon trick of changing color in the face of danger. Not withstanding everything that had been said, done, hallucinated, and imaged, he was finally going to Hell after all. The only thing that kept him from total whimpering surrender was a burning anger at the manner in which he’d come to this place. He’d been conned and deceived; worse than that, by a man he admired and had believed was becoming his friend.

Of course, while alive, he had resolutely disbelieved in the horror of the biblical Hell. Aside from being a stance that he couldn’t credibly take, it had always seemed too cruelly and logistically unsound. What possible purpose was there in torturing sinners for their minor human imperfections, their petty foibles and failures? The Hell of the fundamentalists seemed so irrationally all-consuming. Why was the kid who masturbated to his old man’s back issues of
Playboy
plunged into the same lake of burning lava as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot,
or Vlad Tepes? And if one was to experience anything for a period as vast as eternity, surely one would eventually adapt? The lake of fire could hardly remain a punishment. After the initial shock, wouldn’t the nerve endings burn out and turn it into nothing more than an environment, and a pretty ridiculous environment at that? Jim’s philosophy toward Hell had been one part Descartes; one part Lost in Space. It didn’t compute, therefore it couldn’t be.

In common, though, with everyone else who had lived through the spiritual battering of a basic Judeo-Christian upbringing, the tiny voice from the unassailable infant compartment in his consciousness would remind him, whenever it got the chance, that Hell was real and Jim Morrison was damned to go there. Jim had thought that voice had been stilled forever after the night in Paris, in the old-fashioned bathtub with the claw-and-ball feet, in the slowly cooling water with the three grams of China white running chaotic and deadly wild in his bloodstream and the disposable syringe lying where he dropped it on the blue and white mosaic tile floor. Even amid the garbage dump that now passed for his memory, the first thought, when he’d discovered himself on the other side of the overdose, in a pod in the Great Double Helix, still remained bright, clear, and intact. The priest, Popes, prophets, and conservative politicians had got it all wrong. The Afterlife was a million times more psychedelically complex than the imaginings of Saint John the Divine. He’d been right and they’d been wrong. You could not petition the Lord with prayer. And yet, as he approached the gates of Hell, the voice was back and shrieking like a toddler deprived of its Ritalin:

“Told you so! Told you so!”

It had all seemed so clean and clear, so much more as it ought to be. Admittedly, he hadn’t up to this point, done anything too productive in the netherworld. His only excuse was that he had felt the right to a vacation after the shit he’d been through in the last few years of his life. Too many people had seemed bent on laying the hopes, fears, and psychoses of the 1960s squarely on his shoulders. Up until Charlie Manson and his riot girls had happened along, hadn’t he been the dark side personified? Sure, after he’d died, he’d ambled and rambled, fought with the hopeless Dionysians, and generally gone on drinking and carousing and losing his memory, maybe more than once, for all he knew. Was he supposed to have been scoring points of some kind instead of frittering away his time?
Or was all that had happened since his death merely a sadistic prologue, a vicious lull before the full-blown shitstorm of God-fear could crash back on him as it apparently had when he read that legendary inscription.
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE!
Now the small voice had grown so large it drowned out all other thoughts. Doc Holliday, Long Time Robert Moore, and all the others who had eased him down the path to perdition were nothing but a conspiracy of illusions. Abandon all hope, Jim Morrison, you’re en route to the unthinkable.

“Told you so! Told you so!”

The tide that was physically floating him to the unthinkable ran fast and straight, between arching walls of masonry like a set for
The Phantom of the Opera
. Had Jim not been so far gone, he might have noticed how his entering the Domain of the Damned through a replica of the Parisian sewer system wasn’t without a certain irony. For some reason, presumably to make turning back much more difficult, the River Styx had reversed its direction and was now flowing headlong to whatever awaited. Doc had even turned off the launch’s motor, allowing it to run free with the rapid current. The air in the tunnel smelled musty and ancient, almost like a tomb. He also thought he heard echoes of mass moaning, but it was too indistinct for a certain identification. When he thought he saw lights up ahead, he quickly looked to see how much whiskey remained in the bottle. A bare two inches. “Might as well meet the devil as drunk as a skunk.”

Jim attempted to finish what was left in one fell gulp, but managed only to choke on it. “Shit, can’t I do anything right.”

Doc, standing at the wheel, glanced around. “You know something?”

Jim angrily shook his head. “I’m definitely not talking to you.”

“Still believe I’m luring you into the pit of Hades?”

“Aren’t you?”

Doc coughed wetly and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Jim’s lip curled. “You’re not the tour guide and I’m going to have to see for myself?”

Doc’s expression turned bleak. “I’ll have you know, sir, you’re starting to try my patience.”

Jim hefted the bottle angrily. “You want to know how I feel right now?”

“You’d like to eat my children if I had any?”

“You’ve fucking got it.”

“In about two and half minutes, you’ll be begging my forgiveness.”

Up ahead, the light at the end of the tunnel was growing increasingly bright. Jim glanced at it, and then back at Doc. “You think so?”

Doc adjusted the wheel so the launch didn’t run into the green, algae-slick wall of the tunnel. “I know so.”

“You’re pretty fucking sure of yourself.”

Doc’s voice graveled out. “That’s why I’m the doctor.”

Jim had no answer to this. Doc thoughtfully scratched the back of his neck. “You remind me a lot of my old running buddy, Louie Celine.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Except you don’t appear to be the fascist type.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Of course, his long day’s journey ended with the night. You want to keep the party going well past dawn. To the end of the night, so to speak.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t think there’s time for an explanation.”

And indeed there wasn’t. Within moments, the launch slipped out of the tunnel into something that was not quite daylight, but Jim would have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the difference. Certainly the spectacle that presented itself was nothing like Jim had imagined. It had none of the trappings he’d visualized in his tunnel fugue of funk and fear. No burning lakes of crimson fire, no tortured souls, no horned demons. He had entered the tunnel expecting Gehenna to the fourteenth power and now he was leaving it with Doc laughing at him. “Here it is, boy, although what it
really
is we can never be too sure. Some say it is and some say it isn’t.”