Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (58 page)

In the moment the visual revelation came, Jim also heard distant music drifting like smoke across the water. Male-voice Wagnerian singing, unaccompanied but pitched to Nordic perfection in a minor key, robust but at the same time mournful. He had to wait a while longer as it drifted closer to see the source of the light and the singing. A Viking longship with dragon prow, most of its deck consumed by flames, floated silently past, followed by a second boat with a black sail and a crew of dark warriors who, with swords uplifted, sang the lament.

Jim turned to where he imagined Dr. Hypodermic to be standing. “The nine-forty-seven to Valhalla?”

“You’re beginning to learn,
mon frère
.”

Semple was gratified that the very first thing that Gojiro attacked was the same elevated highway the procession had taken on its ceremonial way to the Divine Atom Bomb Festival. His first move was to remove most of the traffic with wide sweeps of his tail. The smaller vehicles went flying with hardly a second glance from the Big Green, but then a Necropolis city omnibus attracted his attention. He picked up the double-decker in both hands and flattened it end to end, like a small boy crushing a cardboard box. He destroyed a couple of large semi trucks the same way, but then the tanks started rolling down the highway toward him. The gold-plated armor of Anubis’s crack elite came in with pennants flying and guns blazing. The peppering the tanks gave him with their cannons and heavy machine guns did Gojiro no actual bodily harm, but nonetheless
irritated him intensely. Rather than deal with them piecemeal and have to tolerate the gadfly pinpricks of their firepower, he seized the two sides of the highway in his flatcar hands and began to pull up the roadbed, ripping it loose from its supporting pillars. He then proceeded to roll it up, like a crusty old carpet so reinforced with filth and chewing gum that it just had to go. The tanks tried to reverse away from him, but Gojiro could roll up highway faster than they could retreat, and they were crushed inside the curl of steel and concrete like the filling in a jelly roll.

Within the tumor in the monster’s brain, Semple watched the multiple images in awe and wonderment. “How strong is he? Are there no limits to what he can do?”

Outside the dome, blue and blinding electricity crackled as banks of synapses went into reptilian overdrive. The industrial-strength dinosaur brain-lightning was visible though the fabric of the dome/tumor, which was now translucent. Mr. Thomas looked up at Semple in the eerie flickering light. “Almost no limits on this scale. Especially when his dander’s up. The Big Green has a wicked temper.”

Semple glanced around anxiously. “Are we safe in here?”

Jesus laughed and gestured to the images. “A lot safer than in that building.”

When the roll of highway became an untidy spiral bale more than half his own considerable height, Gojiro appeared to decide that the logistics were too taxing and transferred his rage to punching the tensile integrity out of a twenty-story high-rise. Semple had never imagined that the buildings in Necropolis were particularly well made, but she hardly expected that a couple of right and left jabs to the middle floors were all it required to reduce the structure to a pillar of dust and rubble. From Semple’s point of view, the only unfortunate part of the King of the Monsters’ attack was the considerable number of wretched underclass shacks that were crushed underfoot each time he made a move. Although she had personally not fared well at the hands of the Necropolis poor, she didn’t really believe that they deserved to be trampled by a living mountain. On the other hand, it wasn’t something she was going to waste too much time or regret over. What with all the pollution, oppression, poverty, and cannibalism, for many it was probably a merciful release.

She also couldn’t quite see why the great lizard was so content to hang around in the suburbs, crushing shacks, rolling up roads, and knocking down modest buildings. “Is there any way to get him to
move on to downtown? I want to see him total the palace and the TV studios.”

Jesus looked at her with one of his hand-rubbingly wolfish smiles. “Impatient for some payback?”

“Damn right I’m impatient.”

He looked down at the remote. “Then let’s see what we can do.”

Jim tilted the pipe to the right, about thirty degrees from the vertical, and the impossibly beautiful Asian woman applied the blue and yellow flame of the small lamp to the ball of purest tar-black Shanghai opium that nestled inside. Jim was beginning to get used to the near-seamless shifts of reality. He had quickly realized that his only safe course was to go where the Mystère took him, accept each new situation on its face value, and not struggle or kick or ask too many damn fool questions. Certainly the current environment was very easy to accept. Hanging chimes sang soft and lazy harmonics in the slight, sweet-scented breeze created by gliding fans. Candles flickered in sevens, tens, and dozens, positioned before dark mirrors and behind the diffusion of parchment screens or the refraction of the cracked leaded glass of hexagonal Tiffany shades that split light into unimagined spectra and cast soft auras of protection over all those safely gathered within.

Jim drew long and steadily on the ivory pipe and, although the tiny carved dragons didn’t actually move, the eighteen-inch tube all but had a life of its own as the living smoke insinuated the receptors of his brain, formally bowing with mandarin manners and welcoming itself as an old and valued friend before it moved on to enfold him in its perfect velvet detachment and gently lead him beyond the reach of hurt or destiny. When they had first arrived at the Palace of Mirrors, Dr. Hypodermic had told him, “Don’t get too accustomed to this place. It’s only an interlude, a rest stop before the tour continues.” He now saw the reason for the warning.

The other dragons, however—the ones on the slit silk skirt of the impossibly beautiful Asian woman’s vibrantly tight cheongsam—did move. They came animatedly alive as she replaced the long pipe in its ornate holder and got respectfully to her feet from the opium den version of the Hefner bunny dip that she had assumed while ministering to his needs. “Are you content for now?”

Jim smiled blissfully, sinking back into the fully reclined seat. Hypodermic had told him not to get too accustomed to the place, but Jim was already wishing for the interlude never to end. “I don’t think it would be possible to be any more content.”

Like the cabin attendant of some divine airline, the woman moved on to the next passenger—or client? customer? trick? Jim watched the sway of her hips and the exquisite sheen of her perfect legs. He appreciated the small reflections from the garment and the way it stretched taut as she leaned forward to address the intoxicant needs of the racked and inert figure in the recliner across the aisle. He appreciated the contours of her ass in a way that was almost completely lacking in active desire. Such was the relationship between the drug and the sex drive. Even the spurs of the flesh to that which was ultimately pleasurable were blunted to a glorious objectivity. As she held the lamp to the new pipe, the flame triggered a rainbow of hallucinations, equal in their perfection to the wafting curves of the woman’s hypnotic body. The true glory was that Jim didn’t have to do a damn thing about it. All he needed was simply to relax down into the magical wonder of it all, where the dreams were waiting to claim him. With time at least temporarily negated under the opium spell, he didn’t need to worry that Hypodermic would wake him and insist that they continue the tour of the Mystère. He didn’t even have to worry about the fact that the figure in the next recliner looked a great deal like Doc Holliday.

An inset window came up in the top right corner of the forward screen. Jesus smiled. To Semple’s mind, he was becoming altogether too pleased with himself as the trashing of Necropolis progressed. “I think you’ll like this.”

Gojiro was now wading knee deep in the city’s business district, wrecking imposing corporate structures left and right. A hapless Zeppelin swung into the King of the Monsters’ field of vision and was instantly incinerated by a burst of blue breath. Its hydrogen exploded like a giant phallic firecracker. Boom! Gojiro trundled on. All around him, pillars of red fire and oily black smoke marked where entire city blocks were burning, ignited by electrical sparks and the gas tanks of recklessly hurled vehicles. Gushers of steam erupted as progressive sections of the computer network blew its
boilers. Jesus looked round at Semple and Mr. Thomas “Don’t you just love to see a city on fire, trapped in its own death throes?”

The great creature’s newest objective appeared to be a squat and singularly ugly double-triangle pyramid festooned with tall steel broadcast antennae and satellite uplink dishes. Semple peered at the screen. “The TV center?”

Jesus nodded. “Watch the inset.”

At that moment all the window showed was random, cathode-stream snow, but then the snow cleared and Semple found that, of all the TV shows on all the TV channels in the Afterlife, she was watching
Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club
. Semple blinked. “How the hell did that get there?”

“Watch and learn.”

In black and white so crude and grainy that it was almost an insult to the viewer, and with all the production quality of a snuff movie, the painted and powdered naked women Fat Ari treated as the merchandise paraded down the catwalk, smiling into the camera with painfully phony, frightened allure, and leaning forward so the potential customers on the other end of the process could clearly read the barcodes on their foreheads.

Mr. Thomas chewed a chunk of plastic packing material and snuffled through his nose. “There but for the grace of someone . . . ”

Semple looked at the goat in surprise.

“You know about me and Fat Ari?”

“Even a goat has his sources.”

Jesus glanced up from running the remote. “If you’d made it to the catwalk, I certainly would have put in a bid for you.”

“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”

Jesus shrugged. “I would have thought so.”

Mr. Thomas looked around for something else to eat. “Of course, you didn’t have a barcode . . . ”

“How the hell do you guys know all this?”

Jesus looked down at the remote as though he suddenly had something very important to do, and Mr. Thomas simply avoided her eyes. Semple, oblivious for the moment to what Gojiro might be doing outside, planted her superhero gauntlets on her hips and looked disgustedly at Jesus and the goat. “Are you telling me that you two used to sit up here and watch Necropolis TV for
fun?
”

Mr. Thomas nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “It can be one of the more entertaining channels for the warped of taste.”