Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (39 page)

“Who does?”

“Phibes.”

Doc nodded to the bigger craft, now almost level with them. His expression was one of weary disdain. “Yonder monster of overelaboration is a product of the excessively celebrated Runcible Phibes.”

Jim frowned. “Should I know about Phibes?”

Doc pushed back his hat. It was the teacher/pupil routine again.

“Runcible Phibes is the leading light of the post-logical school. Some say post-logicalism is the first truly indigenous art movement of the hereafter, but I fear I am not one of them.”

“Does it really float? Or run on wheels on the river bottom like those Pirates of the Caribbean boats at Disneyland?”

Doc snorted. “I’ve never yet laid eyes on Disneyland, boy. I was seventy years dead when that damned place opened.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect I didn’t miss much. A good friend told me once, and I totally trust his judgment, that Disneyland put him in mind of what Hitler would have wanted the world to be after he’d killed everyone he didn’t like.”

Jim nodded. “That’s definitely one way of looking at it.”

The mushroom cloud grew in Semple’s perception until it overwhelmed all else in the landscape. It seemed to be drawing her to it. Somehow its elemental force had managed to infiltrate her consciousness, as though it wanted to force her to join it, or at least to abase herself before it. It seemed to be talking to her, telling her it was the only symbol that remained for her, the Pillar of Cloud in the wildness, the Great Tree of Evil Fruit. She had almost called it the Tree of Life, but there was no way that the word “life” could ever be appropriate for this towering blossom of fundamental destruction, or the accursed place and equally accursed mind that had brought it into being. The only mercy was that, in running to it, she had left the Nubians way behind. Where most of the pursued had milled around and attempted to double back, to circle toward the city, Semple had carried on as straight and as fast as she could, directly into the desert. The ones who had tried to return to Necropolis had been sent bloodily to another place. The curve of the Nubian formation had surrounded them, the horns of the bull had closed, the golden spears went to work, and the victims took their leave of Anubis’s desert, to the pods with a final scream. As far as Semple could observe, she and the rearing atomic cloud were all that remained.

She looked back a number of times, just to make sure all pursuit had ceased, before she felt safe enough to stop running and attempt to catch her breath. It was only when she finally stopped that she realized just how winded she was. She leaned forward, hands on knees,
eyes closed, bent double, gasping, with the circulation pounding in her head. Her legs were shaking and threatening to give out on her. For one fearful moment, she wondered if this heralded the onset of another bout of the melting horror, but her body managed to struggle back to normality and she slowly straightened up. For a brief time, this fear of the melting had pushed the influence of the atomic cloud out of her mind. As she reopened her eyes, she half hoped that it might have gone, borne away on some desert wind, but the mushroom of poison vapor was still in front of her, showing no sign of dissipating or even losing its shape. Indeed, the mighty fungoid head, atop its roughly cylindrical trunk, appeared to be expanding still, growing between her and the sun, so that a dark shadow advanced across the blast-blown desert directly toward her. A new impulse suddenly entered her mind. She no longer had to go to the cloud. All she had to do was to wait for the shadow to come to her.

As far as she could tell, the outer edge of the cloud-cast shadow was maybe seventy yards from her, but it was moving quickly closer. It seemed to cover the desert at something well in excess of walking pace, and the seventy yards quickly dwindled to fifty, thirty, twenty-five, and the nearer it came, the more her strength ebbed, leaving her without the will to resist or flee. As it moved inexorably closer to the immediate ground on which she stood, she began to feel almost transparent, as though her very being were ebbing. What was this? Some bizarre new unknown ending? With the shadow just a few feet from her, she felt as though she could no longer breathe; her motor functions spun out of control, she was hot and then cold, her thoughts became randomized, without thread or pattern. She was scattering. She hardly knew who she was, even had doubts as to
what
she was. And then the shadow touched her and she became a part of the blackness that hid the sun. As a conscious being, Semple ceased.

Doc shaded his eyes and looked more closely at the passing pleasure boat. “I see they have their own shipboard entertainment.”

A dancer was performing for a small audience on the quarterdeck of the great white and gold river palace. All but naked, she turned, undulated, and pranced, legs lifted high in mock classic symbolic poses that looked to Jim privately like bullshit, having engaged in some similar bullshit himself back in the days of yore. The dancer’s
arms dipped and waved, trailing a long chiffon scarf. Jim grinned at Doc. “Isadora Duncan disciple?”

“It could be the divine Isadora herself.”

“You think so?”

Doc squinted from beneath his hat, looking more closely at the dancer. “It’s too far to tell for sure, but it looks like her. If I just had binoculars powerful enough that I could see her mole, I’d know . . . ”

“You know her?”

“Isadora took a fancy to me once, way back down the road. I recall we spent a memorable three nights in a hot-sheet, yab-yum motel out on one of the caravan routes.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“As a gentleman, I surely can’t elaborate. It did seem, though, even back then, the manner of her death hadn’t done anything to put her off her taste for flowing scarves.”

“Isadora Duncan, huh?”

“Watch your course there, boy.”

They had passed the bigger ship now, but while Jim’s attention had been fixed on the dancer, he had allowed the launch to drift uncomfortably close to its backwash. He quickly adjusted the wheel and then took a final look at the dwindling form of the near-nude dancer. He grinned at Doc. “Three nights, huh?”

Doc pulled down his hat so his eyes were hidden. “Maybe, in some time yet to come, my boy, you’ll take this Semple McPherson to the same place. If you find yourself doing that, ask for a hostess called Shen Wu. She really likes her work.”

Jim didn’t smile. The idea of this woman who might be in his future filled him with both unrequited curiosity and a strange unease. He turned back to steering a straight course and did his best not to think about her. He knew that kind of obsessive thinking about something he could do nothing about was a guaranteed shortcut to neurosis.

While Jim was trying not to think about the mysterious Semple McPherson, Doc drank in the shade of his hat brim. Each in his own way was too absorbed to notice another, smaller appearance on the river. A hundred yards astern of the launch, the black upper lens housing of a submarine’s periscope broke the surface and peered unblinkingly in its direction.

“A woman is a better conductor of heat than steel.”

“What?”

“Aluminum is a better conductor of heat than steel.”

“I have to be dreaming.”

“A shaman is a letter seductor to cheat and steal.”

“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”

But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander; not exactly as lonely as a cloud, but equally ethereal. She knew, however, that this wasn’t one of those times.

“A hymen is abetting the reaction to beat and feel.”

“Stop this now!”

Semple seemed to be somewhere underwater, deep water; somewhere in the depths of a deep body of water, and the repeating, distorting, irritating voice had a deep, sewer-pipe, bubbling sound that bounced and came back at her like the ping pulses of sonar. “A dolmen is—”

“I said,
stop
.”

The repeating irritating voice changed. It suddenly sounded resentful, querulous. “But I go with the hallucination.”

“I’m trying to rid myself of the hallucination.”

Exotic, multicolored warm-water fishes swam all around her; above her head, a large object, perhaps a submarine or an aquatic reptile, moved purposefully between her and the rippling dapple-green light that had to be the surface of the water. Semple had known at once this was a hallucination. If the atomic cloud had actually somehow returned her to a primal sea of origin and rebirth, some unknown parallel of the Great Double Helix, she knew she’d be accepting it with a lot more resignation. In fact, all she wanted was to fight. She wanted to kick out and swim to the surface and scream in fury at whatever fate had precipitated her into this fine new mess. Moreover, if this were the Helix, she wouldn’t be so goddamned thirsty. Despite being entirely immersed, she was parched, her tongue swollen, her lips threatening to crack. She knew that to slake the thirst, all she had to do was open her mouth, but something told her with that first drink she would also drown, and be swept away to the Great Double Helix.

But how could she drown if she had no body? The realizations and revelations were coming thick and fast. In a flash she knew that
the raging, illogical underwater thirst was the only corporeal aspect to this entire new episode. She looked down, or rather, she
perceived
down and saw . . .
nothing
, no legs to kick, no arms to power herself upward, no body to move. She seemed to be nothing more than a bubble of consciousness; and her consciousness had no buoyancy. All the time she remained submerged and without physical form, she seemed to be sinking deeper, until the light from above became a vestigial thing. The fish took partners, touched fins, and waltzed in these newly plumbed depths, their own luminescence providing passing mirror-ball highlights in their watery ballroom. She might have stopped to admire this circling aquarial tableau had she not been so consumed with fury; and yet the angrier she became, the faster she sank. “What the hell is going on here? Is this supposed to be some kind of torture? If so, what the fuck did I do? Whoever’s doing this, at least have the balls to show your goddamned self!”

This outburst finally took her all the way to the bottom, where she bounced leadenly on surprisingly hard and resilient mud, and then came to rest, an angry and misshapen balloon, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze from a tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Dark, submarine plants undulated around her with the current; she lay, helpless and immobile, like one more piece of discarded jetsam on the bottom of this unholy sea. Surely this wasn’t her final fate? Was she condemned to remain there, unable to do anything but gather silt and watch the fish dance?