Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (5 page)

The obvious stylistic influence and overall effect of the chamber was decidedly Islamic, akin in some ways to an anteroom in a huge and magnificent mosque. This had been Semple McPherson’s original intention when she had conceived the chamber and all of the other rooms in her extensive domain. She had been striving for an obvious counterbalance to her sibling’s overbearing, open-air Christianity. Where mosques, however, were places of cool holiness, the smoky red light and the abstract, vaguely flamelike mosaics, in black, scarlet, and gold, that adorned the walls and snaked up all the way to the apex of the dome whispered of damnation and punishment. The ever-burn chromium spheres floating in the convex space, moving about their randomly combustible sphere business, hinted at a cruel surrealism. The runic inscriptions and cabalistic symbols etched in gold on the black marble of the floor provided a louder literary confirmation that this was a place where sweetness and mercy had been banished, right along with faith, hope, and charity. If Semple’s creation was a mosque, it was seemingly a mosque in Hell where, rather than prayer and devotion and the
worship of Allah, the primary focus was the practice of torture and subjugation. If any further amplification was needed, the way the central beam of light fell directly on a chained and kneeling winged figure crouched on the marble floor said it all.

That the light came from above tended to suggest that, somewhere beyond the dome, a larger world existed, perhaps even some semblance of a sun and a sky. In fact, that was not the case. Semple had never bothered to devise any greater reality to give context to the invented Hell in which she dwelled, amused herself, and whiled away a perfectly satisfactory Afterlife. Semple disliked the outdoors. Such niceties like earth and sky were the province of her sibling. If Aimee had her way, all of everywhere would be reconfigured in the image of her narrow, conservative, and boringly orthodox concept of a pastoral Heaven.

As with much in the Afterlife, the relationship between the opposing kingdoms of the two sisters was complicated. To think that Aimee’s Maxfield Parrish Paradise was somewhere above, and that Semple’s Arabian Hell was somehow below, was convenient but sadly nonsensical. Such relativities were merely handed on from the mortal coil, handy luggage from the earthly life. They had no factual basis in postmortem complexity.

A wingless second figure stood over the first, unbound and dressed in a costume of military cut that seemed to have been tailored out of either plastic or highly polished leather. This second figure waited just back from the central beam of light, but sufficiently close for highlights to glint on its reflective costume. The standing figure was Semple McPherson herself, arrayed for oppression, eyes hidden behind huge, insect-eye sunglasses. She tapped a slender, wandlike device lightly against the flat palm of her gloved hand and regarded the chained figure on the floor in front of her with a combination of contempt and amusement. After a number of thoughtful taps, she began to walk slowly around him. “You know that you have seriously disappointed me, don’t you? It was a simple, if intimate task, but you managed to prove yourself entirely inadequate. Are you aware of the extent of my disappointment? I gave you every chance, but you failed me abjectly.”

The voice that came from the winged figure was scarcely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry.” The prisoner’s voice had a pleading melodic quality that contrasted with Semple McPherson’s chill interrogation.

Semple halted in her circling. “Speak a little louder, will you?”

“I’m sorry.”

Semple resumed walking around the prisoner. It took five paces to trace a circle around the kneeling figure in the pool of light. As Semple moved, the cruel rap of her ultra-high heels on the mirror-polished stone echoed around the walls of the chamber and produced delayed resonances from the curves of the dome. The leather of her costume creaked and its decorative chains rattled softly, but these faint sounds were hardly loud enough to produce echoes as precise and defined as those of her footfalls. They simply added their own micro-reverberations to the general background sigh that drifted like a sad and recurrent atonal theme through the chamber. Semple was dressed in what she liked to call her “Gestapo” costume, her usual attire for the questioning, abuse, and torture of prisoners and abductees from Aimee’s Heaven. As with most of her outfits, she had designed it herself.

When she and Aimee had separated, Aimee had retained the major part of their original physical appearance, although, with Semple’s contribution to the composite personality removed, she seemed to fade somewhat, into a vapid, ineffectual blonde with large, moist doe eyes that contrasted with her small, judgmental, and almost lipless mouth. Semple, on the other hand, had found herself free to make up a whole new outward persona for herself, absolutely from scratch. With Aimee resembling such a washed-out, constrained, and self-satisfied little prig, Semple had gone for the voluptuous and exotic. She had chosen to become a six-foot-tall, raven-haired Amazon superheroine who combined the best features of Jane Russell and Elizabeth Taylor, writ large and with a few added extra flourishes of her own invention. Combinations of mix and match were the key to much of Semple’s creativity. It was certainly a technique that had been applied to her Gestapo outfit. She was arrayed in what looked to be an amalgamation of the standard sexual dominatrix garb and the dress uniform of some fanciful Nazi Space Patrol, consisting of black leather jodhpurs with a red stripe down the outside seam, high black boots with stiletto spikes, a severely tailored tunic with red inset panels and flashes, and heavy with decorative medals, chains, and epaulets. Her jet-black hair was piled high on her head, her emerald eyes invisible behind the oversized glasses.

After one circle of the figure, she stopped and slowly extended her arm into the column of light so a shadow fell on her kneeling subject. As it passed over him, he shuddered slightly. Semple didn’t know if the response was one of ecstasy or fear, and she didn’t particularly care. She removed her hand from the light and spoke again. “I think I can safely say, without the slightest fear of contradiction, that your understanding of my needs and their gratification was completely unsatisfactory.”

“I’m sorry, my lady.”

Semple ignored him. She could feel a tirade coming on and she saw no reason not to indulge herself. “I made allowances for the fact that my idiot sister saw fit, in an insane outburst of prudery and sexual repression, to create you and your kind without even the slightest hint of genitalia. Having made these concessions, however, I would feel it should be incumbent upon you to spend as much thought, time, and effort as possible perfecting your expertise in other areas of the same endeavor. Do you understand me so far?”

The subject nodded silently and a rustle ran down his wing feathers from shoulder to tip. Semple noted the response with open contempt. The kneeling figure was one of her sibling’s ludicrous angels, and Semple had always found their physical construction decidedly implausible. Their luxuriant, swanlike wings were simply attached to their backs, close to the shoulder blades, as though they had been glued or cemented there with little or no thought as to how the actual function of flight was to be achieved. It was a result, of course, of Aimee’s willful ignorance of human anatomy and her deeply inhibited distaste for any study of the subject, no matter how it might have improved the authenticity of the Heavenly Host that she claimed to care so much about. Of course, the angels, when they flew, were hardly required to overcome an actual terrestrial gravity, but Semple still believed they ought to look as though they were.

Or perhaps it wasn’t altogether justifiable to blame the unreality of the angels entirely on Aimee’s prudery and ignorance. Back when they had still been joined as one, Semple had attempted to work out a mechanically coherent muscular structure for the wings of angels.

Unfortunately, the task had proved all but impossible without tolerating a level of deformity that was close to monstrous. Dynamically correct angels came doubled-over and hunchbacked, not unakin to an avian version of the servant Igor in the old black and
white Frankenstein movies. Such a thing would have been completely unacceptable to Aimee, and Semple had abandoned her efforts. She continued to believe, however, that the traditional image of the angel, essentially an idealized human with wings sprouting from his or her back, endowed with the capability of flight, was both anathema to physics and a technical impossibility.

Her final fallback had been to make it clear to Aimee that, in her opinion, the angels looked stupid at best and even stupider when they were in flight. She had suggested that they should be left out of the heavenly inventory altogether, but her opinion had cut no ice. Aimee, unbending traditionalist that she was, had insisted that Heaven could never be complete without not only angels but cherubim, seraphim, and all of the other whimsical features of the popular Victorian sacred picture-postcard image of the choir celestial. This was probably why Semple now took such a lasting delight in involving Aimee’s less rational creations in her experimental studies regarding the limits of spiritual endurance. If she couldn’t make angels logical, she felt fully justified in abducting and torturing such pathetic half measures.

She continued her interrogation of the angel at hand. “I asked you if you understood me.”

Again the angel mutely nodded, but this wasn’t good enough for Semple. “Out loud, please.”

The angel’s voice choked slightly as though he were doing his best to hold back tears or terror. “Yes, I understand you.” Again, his wing feathers rustled.

The prisoner angel’s wings were, at that moment, secured by a pair of polished steel alligator clips some eight inches long, attached by short chains to anchor rings set in the floor. The angel’s wings might defy scientific logic, but they could also be one hell of a nuisance if the damn thing started to panic and thrash about. The wings of angels in this tailored Heaven had a strength that was more than equal to those of terrestrial swans or eagles.

“So what do you intend to do about it?”

“Do about what, Lady Semple?”

When the angel had first been brought to Semple’s domain, he had been informed that he should afford his captor due courtesy by addressing her as Lady Semple. If he should refer to her by name to a third party, it should be as
the
Lady Semple.

“About your inability.”

The angel didn’t answer. He strained against the bonds that held him, but no words came.

“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

The angel partially found his voice. “I . . . ”

“I still can’t hear you.”

“I don’t . . . ”

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t . . . ”

“I’m beginning to lose patience.” Semple touched the angel lightly with the tip of her wand. He grimaced in sudden pain and recoiled from the contact with a desperate gasp. His answer came out in a single rush of breath as though some block had suddenly been released. “I don’t have any experience. Nothing of that kind ever comes to pass in Heaven.”

Semple’s lip curled. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it?”

“I did the best I could.”

Semple held the wand in front of the angel’s downcast eyes. “You creatures are such weaklings.”

“Perhaps if I was allowed to practice a little more, I might . . . ”

“You want to practice?”

The angel raised his head so he was looking at Semple. “That’s if you don’t destroy me first.”

“Are you attempting to make a play for my sympathy?”

“I don’t want to be destroyed.”

“I hardly overflow with divine forgiveness.”

As though to indicate her lack of basic compassion, Semple glanced over at her three rubber guards who stood a little way off, watching impassively from behind the eyepieces of their grim and featureless suits. The rubber guards were completely identical, and, as though demonstrating their role in Semple’s realm, each one clutched a heavy-duty electric mace in its stubby fingers. These three rubber guards had been the ones that Semple had summoned to drag the terrified but unresisting angel from the luxury of the lady’s nouveau purple bedroom to the Moorish horror of the torture chamber.

The rubber guards were one of Semple’s more original creations and she used them extensively to spread terror and alarm among her fabricated subjects. Although bipedal and humanoid in shape, that was pretty much where any human resemblance ended. The loose
suits of inch-thick black rubber with their anonymous circular goggles and air filter snout, not unlike a built-in World War I gas mask, endowed the rubber guards with a shapeless and ultimately sinister uniformity. They were slack but dangerous, heavy balloons with arms, legs, and absolute obedience to their designer. They stood over seven feet tall, and the suits hung loosely like the skin of an elephant, but lacked the amiable pachyderm’s reassuring arrangements of folds and wrinkles.

When originally designing the guards and retainers for her personal Hell, Semple had first toyed with the idea of using traditional medieval demons, but had rejected that as being far too much like what her sister might do if she had been cast as the dark half. In the case of the rubber guards, she had confined herself to a ballpark of the imagination bounded by George Orwell on one side and Jean Cocteau on the other, seeking a monstrous paramilitary figure that was midway between a dehumanized warrior and a bioengineered robot. She had forgotten the exact details of the structure that she had devised to provide the functioning machinery beneath the enigmatic rubber. That was the way with the Lady Semple. She might labor long and hard over an element of her manufactured environment, but the moment the task was complete, she involuntarily and irrevocably downloaded it from her mind. Data crashed and was no more.