Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (64 page)

Jim looked long and hard at Dr. Hypodermic. “I can’t trust a word you say, can I?”

The Doctor grinned broadly. “Absolutely not.”

Semple opened the liquor cabinet for Mr. Thomas. “Help yourself.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t help myself. The hooves, you know. That’s partially why I had myself reincarnated as a goat in the first place. So I couldn’t pour the sauce for myself, if you see what I mean.”

Semple looked surprised. “I don’t usually act as bartender in my own domain.”

Mr. Thomas looked unhappy. “Then we have an impasse?”

“Not really.” Semple picked up a small bell from a side table and shook it so it tinkled musically. Almost immediately a butler entered. “You rang, my lady?”

“Indeed I did, Igor. We need drinks to be poured.”

“Yes, my lady.” Igor glanced at Mr. Thomas. “A gin and tonic, I would assume, sir?”

“How did you know that?”

“It was self-evident, sir.”

“Was it really?”

Igor was already putting ice in the glass. “Oh yes, sir.”

The goat blinked. Although Igor was not a hunchback in the strict Frankenstein tradition, he fit the bill in most other ways. Round-shouldered in his black tailcoat, he was little more than four feet tall, and his full enigmatic lips and big sad goldfish eyes prompted comparisons with Peter Lorre. He handed Semple a cognac and Mr. Thomas his gin. “Will that be all, lady and sir?”

Mr. Thomas thought about this. “Now that you mention it, I am a little peckish.”

Igor nodded. “I will attend to it straightaway.”

He left the room, but returned in a matter of seconds with a snack plate of lettuce, thistles, and two copies of
Vogue
. The goat looked at it delightedly. “That’s wonderful, Igor, my friend, exactly what I wanted. You could have read my mind.”

Igor bowed modestly. “I did, sir.”

Mr. Thomas frowned. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Don’t worry, sir. I never pry.”

As Igor backed out of the room bowing, Mr. Thomas looked up from his plate and glass. “Is he for real?”

Semple nodded. “Oh yes, I didn’t make him. He just turned up one day looking for a job as a domestic and he’s been with me ever since.”

“He does what he does from choice?”

“He’s just a natural seeker after servitude. He’s very good, although now and then he deliberately fucks up. It’s a sign that he wants me to give him a sound ceremonial thrashing. That’s the basic trade-off.”

“And he’s a telepath?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that too much. When one assumes a role of authority, one has to get used to the fact that no secrets can be kept from the servants.”

When Semple had returned to her sanctuary with Mr. Thomas, her first objective had been gratefully to strip off the absurd comic book costume and take a lengthy shower to wash away the accumulated depravity of the outside world. While she accomplished this, she left Mr. Thomas to his own devices in a luxury suite of rooms that had been designed to generate an atmosphere of opulent Renaissance splendor. When she returned, dressed in a robe originally designed by Gianni Versace for Lucrezia Borgia, she moved in full lady-of-the-manor mode. With a drink in her hand, she gratefully sank to a soft reclining couch littered with silk and velvet cushions. “Do you know how good it is to simply relax? I believe I’ve had an overdose of deserts, dinosaurs, and dogheaded gods.”

Unfortunately, this period of relaxation proved only the briefest respite. No sooner had she and the goat settled down to an idleness of alcohol and small talk than alarms went off all over her domain and the noisy footfalls of leather guards slapped down the corridors. The doors of the renaissance suite burst open, and four of the rubber guards hurried inside, weapons at the ready. The leader of the quartet bowed to Semple and addressed her with wheezing breathlessness. “We have detected the approach of an unannounced and unauthorized intruder, my lady.”

Semple seemed doomed to live in interesting times. Both she and Mr. Thomas got to their feet, looking around nervously. “Where exactly is this intruder supposed to arrive?”

“Right here in these rooms, my lady.”

Now Semple was really nervous. She had made a number of enemies in her recent travels, and although she hadn’t thought of it before, she supposed there was always the possibility that one or more of them might have followed her there. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the Dream Warden die on the rooftop in Necropolis. She urgently gave her orders to the guards. “Be ready to shoot on sight.”

The four rubber guards nodded, stiffened, and raised their blasters.

“If some son of a bitch has come here to make trouble, he’ll be blasted to Limbo. I’m really not in the mood for this.”

No sooner were the words out Semple’s mouth than a shimmer appeared in the exact center of the room. Quickly a materializing figure formed inside the shimmer. It was only when the shape stabilized that Semple recognized it and shouted to the guards, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! It’s Aimee, goddamn it!”

The shimmer faded and Aimee stood in the middle of the room, worried and distraught. Despite her obvious distress, Semple instantly vented all of her shock and surprise on her sister. “Why the fuck couldn’t you call first? You never come here unannounced.”

“I never come here at all.”

“All the more reason to call. My guards almost burned you down.”

“I didn’t want the nuns to know where I was going.”

Mr. Thomas lapped his gin again now that the danger had passed. “You’re having trouble with your nuns?”

Aimee glared at the goat as though he had no place to be asking her questions. Semple angrily intercepted the look. “Don’t treat Mr. Thomas like that. He’s a good friend.”

“But he came with him, with that . . . that . . . ” Aimee was at a loss for a suitably apt description.

Semple filled in for her. “Jesus?”

“He isn’t the real Christ.”

“We knew he wasn’t the genuine article. I told you that up front.”

“But you didn’t tell me what he really was.”

“What do you mean, what he really was?”

“Women have started vanishing.”

“Vanishing?”

“First it was three of the dancers on the headland. I didn’t really miss them, but now some of my nuns have disappeared . . . ”

Aimee was talking as though Jesus had already been in her
Heaven for a number of days, but Semple didn’t comment on this. She was accustomed to time passing at different rates in the two neighboring environments. It always evened itself out in the end. “I don’t actually see what the problem is. So you’ve mislaid some nuns and dancing girls? Surely you can replace them.”

“That’s not the point.”

“So what is the point?”

“I think your phony Jesus has something to do with it.”

“I thought you and him were getting on like a house on fire.”

Aimee looked a little shamefaced, enough to make Semple wonder just how much of the house had been on fire. “We were getting along very well, but I couldn’t be with him every hour of the day. There were lengths of time that couldn’t be accounted for.”

“And you think he was creeping around disappearing your women?”

“That’s what the nuns think and they’re blaming me for it.”

While the two women had been talking, Mr. Thomas had started edging toward the door. Semple noticed this out of the corner of her eye and snapped at him, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

The goat did his best to present a picture of innocence. “I thought I’d go and talk to Igor. You two obviously have family business to discuss.”

“You stay exactly where you are. Don’t so much as move a hoof or I’ll turn my guards loose on you.”

Mr. Thomas looked decidedly unhappy. “I don’t see what use I can be.”

“You lived with him for fuck knows how long, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“But what?”

“I mean, this is the Afterlife, isn’t it? What does it matter if he’s a serial . . . ”

Both Aimee and Semple were stunned. “He’s a serial killer?”

The goat was defensive. “Yes, but I mean, they don’t actually die, do they? They either go back to the pods, or else it hardly matters because you can just make another one. It’s really very minor compared to what happens in some places.”

Aimee could hardly believe what she was hearing, and Semple had to remind herself what a sheltered life her sibling lived. “That’s not the point. The nuns don’t like it, and if I don’t do something about him, I’m going to have a full-scale mutiny on my hands.”

Semple peered curiously at Mr. Thomas. “How long have you known he had these kinds of . . . tastes?”

Mr. Thomas hung his head. “I guess I always suspected. Some of the things he said and the porno he liked to watch. It wasn’t until the problems with the girls from Fat Ari that I knew for sure.”

“The girls from Fat Ari weren’t lost in transit?”

Mr. Thomas shamefully shook his head. “The truth became a little twisted in the telling.”

“So why the hell didn’t you warm me later, when you knew we were coming here?”

Now the goat felt that he was on firmer ground. “It wasn’t my place to drop a dime on him. And besides, we were boxed in. We had to get out of the Big Green’s brain.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

“I am your friend. I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t know you had a problem with serial . . . ”

Aimee butted in. “Why don’t you use the word ‘murderer’? That’s what he is, isn’t it? A damned murderer?”

Semple ignored Aimee’s outburst and thought carefully. So Jesus had turned out to be a highly unpleasant kind of pervert. If all things were equal, she really ought to leave her sister to deal with it as best she could. In the Nietzschean long run, solving the problem herself would only serve to make Aimee stronger. Unfortunately, things were never that equal; blood was blood and genes were genes, and Semple simply couldn’t just leave her only sister at the mercy of rebel nuns and a phony run-amok Jesus Christ. The question also remained unresolved as to what might happen to the other sibling if one went to the pods. “We’re going to have to sort this fool out, aren’t we?”

Aimee nodded. “We are.”

Semple sighed. The cliché “No peace for the wicked” seemed to be working overtime. “Let me put on something more suitable, and we’ll be on our way. Do you think I should bring some of my guards?”

Aimee frowned. “That seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?”

Mr. Thomas now felt it was safe to make a helpful interjection. “Do the nuns have access to weapons?”

Aimee looked at him as if he were crazy. “What would nuns want with weapons?”

“You never can tell with nuns.”

Aimee was shaking her head. “Armed nuns? That’s absurd.”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “I’m glad it’s not my problem.”

Semple turned angrily on him. “Who says it’s not your problem?”

“You can’t hold me responsible for what that idiot Jesus gets up to.”

“I hold you responsible enough to take you with us.”

Mr. Thomas sighed. “Me? You’re taking
me
back to that ridiculous trailer-park Heaven?”

“That’s right,
you.”