Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (41 page)

“Stone the whore!”

At first Semple was blind. The only information she was receiving was aural and tactile. She knew she had returned to her familiar body, which was of some comfort, but this was offset by the indignity of being stretched out on her back, totally without clothes, on hard stony dirt, staring straight up into a blindingly bright sun in a dangerously clear sky. She was covered by a fine layer of dust that even packed her nose, mouth, and ears, as though, in temporal reality, she had been lying there for quite some time. She also sensed that a number of people were standing over her. Presumably the ones who were talking about stoning the whore. It was possible that she wasn’t the whore in question, but she wasn’t holding out too much hope. Luck had hardly been with her on this adventure. Pain shot through the muscles of her arm as she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. She really had been lying there a long time. As her vision gradually returned, she could make out dark shapes leaning into her field of vision, peering down at her through the sundogs and colored retinal burn. They
were
talking about her.

“I say get her on her feet and whip her out to the badlands.”

“Stoning her would be quicker.”

“She’s right. We can’t waste any time today. The Patriarch is in a foul temper. He wants to make twenty miles by nightfall.”

One voice had a particularly snide and insinuating tone. “Maybe he’ll change his mind when he gets a look at her. A good punishment could be just the thing to improve his mood.”

As Semple’s eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the darker shapes began to assume form. Now she was looking up into a circle of faces that were as coarse, malformed, and ignorant as any that could be found in any part of even the darkest backwoods of Arkansas or Mississippi. Narrow, suspicious eyes peered down at her from under low brows and lumpy foreheads. A hand came toward her, but she ducked away from it with a snarl. “You won’t touch me if you know what’s good for you.”

The hand jerked back. Just as on Earth, Semple thought, trash
was trash and you had to show it who was boss. Despite all of her disorientation and naked vulnerability, she had to take the offensive. Whatever might happen to her here, it could hardly be worse than what she had been subjected to at the hands of Anubis, Fat Ari, Mengele, and the rest. She was heartily sick of being shoehorned into a whimpering victim role. This time, she’d be damned if she was going to take it lying down, literally or otherwise. She snarled again and the circle around her backed off. The snarling routine seemed to be working, so she tried it a third time, with even more feeling, using it as a cover while she rolled over to get her hands and knees under so she could spring to her feet with a quick leap. As soon as she was on two legs, she dropped into a simian defensive crouch. She knew she probably made a scary enough sight to begin with, and she hoped that behaving like a feral thing might spook them entirely. If these fools believed she was some kind of desert djinni, some banshee she-devil, let them. Just as long as they stayed good and terrified, they’d be much less likely to start reaching for the rocks they’d seemed so gung-ho to start hurling a few moments earlier.

She turned slowly; snorting through her nose with what she hoped was sufficiently demonic ferocity. It certainly seemed to be working. The circle around her retreated another couple of paces. She continued to turn, acting every inch the cornered succubus, carefully observing all the while. The small crowd was completely composed of women, although, a short distance away, a number of men and a flock of scrawny, black-faced sheep stood staring; dealing with she-demons was women’s work. The women in question were possibly the ugliest and most depressing collection of broads she had ever encountered. Perhaps she could somehow turn this to her advantage. If these horrors were a representative sample of local womanhood, the men might well be drawn to their sheep; given the look of the men, the sheep were the ones truly getting the shitty end of the deal. And Semple knew whereof she spoke. The camp meetings they had run when she and Aimee were alive and one, starting out on the rocky road to fame and fortune in the evangelism racket, had attracted more than their fair share of the benightedly repugnant. This bunch clearly thought of themselves as the Children of Israel in a wilderness straight out of the
Classics Illustrated
Book of Exodus, but to her they resembled nothing more than a bunch of Ozark inbreds without even the benefit of dilapidated Ford trucks. She had
managed their kind before; if they didn’t immediately turn violent, she could manage them again.

The women came in all shapes and sizes, from eating disorder blubber to rawboned and desiccated. They were all dressed in cheap, coarse, Old Testament homespun, but their faces made them look like Elvis’s educationally challenged cousins on his daddy’s side: sour, mean, and ignorant, with built-up heads of resentment that stretched back so many generations it was encoded in their DNA. One who was a little braver than the rest, a tall streak of sour vinegar, turned and faced her companions. “I say stone her now. Before she can put a hex on the lot of us.”

Semple laughed nastily. “You’re all double-hexed already. You’ll have boils all over your bodies within the hour.”

She hoped this would put the fear into them. It seemed to work on some, who stopped glaring at her and began nervously peering inside the loose caftans, in search of latent blemishes. The tall woman, however, was not one of these. Semple had miscalculated. The threat only made her more determined. “How many times do I have to tell you? Stone the abomination, whatever it is!”

The tall woman appeared to possess a certain natural authority; after only a few seconds of hesitation, a majority of the others were bending down, reaching for rocks, pleased that someone was doing their thinking for them, and that the thinking involved direct and easy action. They started moving back, widening the circle so they wouldn’t hit each other when the boulders commenced to fly. This wasn’t going Semple’s way. Trying somehow to crack this reality, Semple looked around wildly, but she knew it was impossible. Dull, fearful, and brutish they might be, but there were too many women gathered in this place for her to erase them with her mind. They didn’t even need the sheep’s help to keep this bit of stinking desert intact. She didn’t want to believe she was going to be stoned back to the Great Double Helix by a bunch of primitive hick herdspersons, but it sure looked that way. If worse came to worst, was there any way to avoid the pain? She had to find an answer, and soon. The women were already winding up to throw. But then, miraculously, the cavalry charged to the rescue. There came an impossibly deep and booming voice: “AND WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE LORD IS GOING ON HERE?”

The voice resonated with fundamentalist and wholly phony electronic bass reverb. A new player had entered the auditorium. The
women dropped their rocks, panic-stricken. As one they raised their right arms and signed an invisible circle in the air, hands arranged with index and middle finger extended, much in the same manner as a Pope blessing the multitude. Later Semple would find out that this was the so-called Sign of the Eternal Continuation, with which the followers of the Patriarch were expected to pay tribute to their leader. In other parts, she would also learn, it was known as the Universal Sign of the Donut. This new player was close to seven feet tall, with wild white hair, flowing robes, the beard of a prophet, and a carved wooden staff in his right hand. He’d had the good grace not to make himself look exactly like Charlton Heston, but he wasn’t far off. Semple knew this had to be the Patriarch. Before she’d agreed to go on Aimee’s fool’s errand, she’d been aware that some damn silly demented Moses was on the loose in the wilds, pretending to look for the Promised Land with a bunch of retard followers. She heard he staged orgies just so he could get his kicks smiting the sinners. If this wasn’t he, it had to be another exactly like him.

The Patriarch acknowledged the women’s salute with a curt motion of the staff and repeated his demand. “I ASKED YOU, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?”

The women avoided his eyes; not even the tall one managed to muster the courage to answer, so Semple, deciding she really had nothing to lose, placed both hands on her hips and adopted a pose of nude, if dusty, defiance. “This bunch of weary, sheep-cuckolded hags was trying to get up the nerve to stone me to death.”

The Patriarch slowly looked her up and down. Although he maintained a pose of righteous outrage, Semple saw something else in his eyes that was far from righteous and all too familiar. The son of a bitch was as horny as the next guy. Maybe hornier. As Patriarch, he was probably above seeking the comfort of sheep. Catching on, she posed like a cheap pinup. “You must be this Moses character I’ve been hearing about.”

“INDEED I AM MOSES, THE PROPHET OF THE LORD THY GOD, AND WHAT MANNER OF NAKED ABOMINATION ARE YOU?” Without waiting for an answer, Moses waved an arm in the direction of the now-silent women. “BRING LINEN TO COVER THIS THING!”

A short, fat woman hurried away and quickly returned with a rough, homespun caftan like the ones she and the others were wearing. She seemed frightened to approach Semple; only when Moses
glared at her did she dare to step forward, eyes averted, to hand the garment over. Semple snatched it from her, as though impatient with all the fear and hesitation. It was probably the ugliest piece of apparel that Semple had ever been expected to wear, and before putting it on, she inspected it slowly and carefully. Although the same dun color as the desert, it seemed reasonably clean and free of lice, so finally she slipped it over her head and turned around as though modeling the thing for Moses. “Is that better? You’d rather have me clothed and shapeless?”

Moses seemed a little unnerved by Semple’s pirouette, but covered himself by roaring even louder, “I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”

Semple was determined not to be intimidated by Moses’ crude bombast. She’d heard enough voice-amplification tricks in the court of Anubis not to be blown away by this fool’s bass boost and slap-back echo. She stood her ground and inspected the Patriarch with an expression that verged on insolence. “Is this how you treat an unfortunate traveler who has fallen to misfortune in the wilderness?”

Clearly Moses wasn’t accustomed to being addressed in this manner. Most of his followers were probably too dumb and brainwashed to speak unless spoken to directly. “I DEMAND TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COME FROM!”

“You think you might lower the volume a little? I really find it very hard to conduct any kind of conversation under these circumstances. And while we’re at it, if someone doesn’t offer me some water, I’m liable to die of thirst and dehydration before you find out anything about me at all. I always assumed the giving of water, even to a stranger, was common courtesy among all desert peoples, no matter how primitive.”

This gave Moses the easy out of barking another order. “FETCH HER WATER!”

Semple now knew she had the measure of this biblical blowhard. He didn’t want to see her stoned any more than she did. At least not until he’d had a chance to get her on her own and see if she was up for a little patriarchal bodily tribute. And yet he seemed uncertain how to pull if off with all the women, plus the men and the sheep, watching his every move. Don’t worry, Moses my boy, she thought. I’ll give you any help you need. Just get me away from these potential rock throwers.

This time a different woman waddled quickly off to do the Patriarch’s
bidding. When she returned with an earthenware pitcher, she, too, shied away from eye contact. The water tasted brackish, but it was cool and wet, and just what Semple’s parched throat gasped for. She drank slowly and with care, however. She was well aware that drinking too much, too fast under these conditions could cause all manner of physical problems, and she wasn’t about to take any chances. She also suspected that, among the Moses Family, water was strictly rationed. If so, another way by which she might assert her separateness and superiority over this badland trash presented itself. When she’d finished drinking, she poured the rest of the contents of the pitcher slowly and deliberately over her head. As she’d expected, the women let out a collective gasp at her cavalier attitude to what, for them, was a precious fluid. She ignored their response and handed the container back to the woman with a satisfied sigh. “God, that was good.”

Moses immediately rounded on her with a bellow. “YOU TAKE THE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN?”

Semple looked at Moses as though she were starting to lose patience. “Will you get off it? I know exactly what you are. And I’m not impressed by all your bellowing and bluster.”

For a moment, she thought she might have overplayed her hand. Moses looked around at his followers as though he were going to give the order to let the stoning begin all over again, but instead he merely waved an angry arm. “DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE WORK TO DO? GET ABOUT YOUR ALLOTTED TASKS AND STOP STANDING AROUND GAPING. THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO SEE HERE.”

Semple nodded to herself. Good thinking, pal. Send the common herd back to their business so we can get down to ours. As the crowd of women reluctantly moved away, he turned back to Semple. “NOW WILL YOU TELL ME WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE?”

At the sound of his voice, many of the followers stopped in their tracks and stared at the exchange. Some of the sheep bleated uneasily and Semple sighed. “It really might be an idea to lower the volume a bit. It doesn’t impress me and makes it hard to retain our privacy.”

For an instant Moses looked as though he were about to strike her down with his staff. Lust and the need to maintain authority stood conflicted. Then lust won out and he lowered the staff, at the
same time killing the echo and reverb. He took a deep breath. It seemed he’d been playing the Wrath of God for so long that normal conversation was hard for him. “So what are you?”