Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (67 page)

Another advantage to the brief interval on the boat had been the attendants. The tall, slender, coffee-colored Amazons looked as if they came from the same basic gene pool as the drummer and the woman with the whip, and they seemed to have the sole purpose of keeping the passengers satisfied. They served him rum-based fruit drinks that came complete with slices of pineapple and small paper umbrellas. One had even offered to give him a rubdown with herbs and hot oil. Jim had been sorely tempted, but he’d shot a covert
glance across the quarterdeck to where the three Mystères were deep in earnest conversation in a bizarre and lilting Creole patois. In addition to the Doctor and Danbhala La Flambeau, the Baron Tonnerre was also aboard the Ship of Agoueh. Indeed, he had been waiting in one of his elaborate, bemedaled uniforms when they’d arrived on board. The original trio was again complete, and Jim decided that maybe a massage was too frivolous for an occasion invested with such gravity, even if no one was about to tell him why. He passed up the hot oil and herb rubdown and settled for a succession of the powerful rum drinks. As a result, when the trireme shipped its oars and moored at the pier, and Jim finally descended the gangplank, he was more than three parts drunk and walking a little unsteadily.

Mercifully, Jim found he wasn’t required to walk very far. An open car with a landau top was waiting. It was unlike any car Jim had ever encountered, dwarfing any automobile he’d seen in either dream or life. The hood alone must have been thirty feet long and the tonnage of chrome outweighed that of even the most fancifully customized semi, and that wasn’t to mention the gold trim. From knowledge acquired from his long-lost hot-rod home boys back in the metalflake sixties California of Big Daddy Ed Roth and Rat Fink, Jim knew that the lustrous pearlized finish could only have been achieved by a minimum of twenty-nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer, platinum dust, and exotic fish scales. It was truly the cherry paint job of the gods. The machine might once have been a 1930s movie-star Duesenberg, but it had been stretched, enlarged, extended, and so elaborately curved and curliqued that it was scarcely recognizable. Jim wondered who might create and customize these mobile palaces for the ancient African gods. Did they dream them up themselves and just make them real in a flash of kinetic magic? Or were there somewhere, perhaps in sweating caves under the volcano, holy and secret chop shops where car-culture Leonardos pushed the envelopes of their talent, working with dedication and diligence for their exalted masters?

As Jim and the Mystères left the pier and approached the supercar, a chauffeur opened the door for them. He wore the uniform of the Baron Tonnerre’s crack honor guard, and seemed to be yet another part human, part demigod kin of the trireme’s drummer, mistress-overseer, and attendants. Two more similarly uniformed outriders waited a little way in front of the car astride two of the largest Harley-Davidsons in creation.

From this first impression, Jim could only assume that the Voodoo pantheon did everything in massive and highly flamboyant style. This was immediately confirmed as the huge car and its outriders moved forward along the crushed-shell gravel road that led away from the harbor. Screened by stands of cypress, groves of palms, and luxurious banks of rhododendron and fire dragon, sprawling and elaborately fanciful mansions were set back from road, some lit flamboyantly like Graceland on a Tennessee summer night, others remaining masked and dark with strange flames sporadically showing at mullioned windows. In parks and gardens that were at one and the same time both wild but carefully tended, fountains sang and sparkled, and fires burned in braziers atop tall stone beacons. Big cats prowled; peacocks strutted; on one opulent lawn a herd of decorative white rhinos grazed on the greensward and cropped the shubbery. While most of these palaces and mansions favored a basic European billionaire luxury from the school of high Beverly Hills or Colombian narco lord, the open supercar twice passed the formidable, thorn-thicket outer walls of much more traditional Royal Zulu kraals from the time of Cetshwayo. He also spotted no less than four domed and minaretted quasi-mosques, a number of brick beehive structures, but with the bricks fashioned from solid gold and silver, outsized opals, and squared-off blocks of emerald and diamond. He even saw one exact reproduction of the White House, and another of the Alhambra.

When he was first told that he was going to the Island of the Gods, Jim had naively expected to find some across-the-board melting pot of religions and denominations, a place where Baal, Quetzacoatl, Crom, and the Lord Krishna all dwelled discreetly, cheek-by-jowl, like some ecumenical Olympus. In this, he discovered he had been extremely and hopelessly wrong. The Island of the Gods proved to be highly segregated, the exclusive turf of the basic Afro-Creole pantheon along with a few related and kindred spirits.

The big Duesenberg went on climbing higher and higher into the island uplands that culminated in the crater of the volcano. After a while, this started to give Jim pause. Although he was insulated by the quantities of god-rum he had consumed on the Ship of Agoueh, the idea did occur to him that, in the name of sundry gods, more than one white boy had been taken up to a volcano never to return. For a while he contemplated jumping out of the car and making a run for it; he decided against this, however, even though the open
supercar was actually proceeding up the white shell road at a very stately pace. He’d noticed quite soon in the ride that, although each god was deity of the manor in his or her own enclave, the highways and byways of the island were heavily patrolled by Baron Tonnerre’s red-uniformed troopers with their peaked caps, gold lightning-flash badges, and inscrutable sunglasses even at night. Presumably their mission was to deter and eject interlopers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Even if he did manage to make a break, Jim figured he’d probably last about twenty minutes loose on his own in the tropical paradise, a very strange stranger in a very strange land.

As the crater neared, Jim increasingly worried he might be earmarked for a dive into the magma; then, to his relief, the car turned off and headed toward a projecting headland where two massive carved megaliths supported an even bigger capstone. This upper stone was shaped like an eagle with its wings extended, and the closer Jim came to this towering structure, the more he realized that he was in the presence of something incredibly old, maybe older than humanity itself. This atmosphere of the impossibly ancient begged the hallowed question of whether the gods had been around before man had crawled from the swamp, or if it had taken humanity to validate their existence. Like most right-thinking individuals, Jim had always been of the latter opinion, but the closer the supercar came to the megastructure, the less certain he became.

The white road terminated a quarter of a mile from the megaliths themselves. Beyond where the road ended, a paved walk had been laid that described a huge spiral almost the same quarter mile in diameter. The car halted and the chauffeur climbed out and opened the door for the passengers to alight. The Mystères indicated that Jim should get out first. He glanced at Danbhala La Flambeau as he stepped down from the car. “And what happens now?”

She gestured to the ancient curving flagged pavement. “You walk the spiral while we wait for the others to come.”

Semple was nothing more than a mass of fragments, down with the atoms, only held in the loose amalgamation of a meteor shower by the attraction of a simple internal gravity. The single mercy was that she felt no pain. In fact, she felt hardly anything, as though she didn’t have enough singular integrity to experience any of the usual
mental or physical sensations. An anger at Aimee for doing what she’d done seethed somewhere in the backwash of her previous consciousness. An unfocused fear drifted along with the knowledge she was free-falling into a total unknown, without the power to stop or even slow her headlong progress. Even when she’d died, she’d had Aimee with her as part of the composite. Now she was totally alone—more than alone, if the truth were to be told. Many familiar parts of her mind on which she had always depended were now absent, leaving her ill-equipped to deal with the shocks the future undoubtedly had in store. As far as she could tell, she was in Limbo. She had enough memory left to recall that Limbo was a place rarely mentioned in the Afterlife, the ultimate distant nothing to which a soul could be consigned to loiter in the absolute end of the void until it perhaps chanced randomly to drift in the direction of the Great Double Helix. It was probably fortunate that she didn’t have enough emotional makeup left to feel the rush of terror the prospect of Limbo usually inspired. All Semple could really do was dispassionately observe her surroundings, make of them what she could, and wait to see what would happen next.

Beneath her was a micro-world where shiny billiard-ball protons and neutrons circled majestically around clumped spheroid nuclei, and electrons sparked and flashed in spectacular displays of red, blue, and yellow primal fireworks. A small shard of her being was able to appreciate the beauty of it all. She had always imagined that the subatomic world would be a black empty space and an appreciative fraction of what remained of her mind was surprised at the jostling density of this new environment, but it also reminded her that this might not be a real subatomic environment, merely a personal interpretation of the completely unknowable.

As she drifted farther, she began to see that the animated complexity of spheres and lightning had a finite limit. At something like a curved, if not clearly defined, horizon, the bouncing, oscillating atoms and the flashing electrons ended in a seething margin of quantum foam, and beyond that was a seemingly endless black nothing, empty but for a tiny, multicolored, glowing helix. Semple knew this was the Great Double Helix, but so far away it was reduced to the insignificance of a distant nebula. Aimee’s anger had pushed her unimaginably deep into the unknown. How long would she drift helplessly before she reached a point where the pods might draw her in, and set her on the laborious uphill path to a fresh incorporation?
If she got lucky and even reached the distant Double Helix, enough of her sanity might not remain for her to be worth a new persona or a new incarnation. It was lucky she didn’t have too much capacity for forward-looking fear; otherwise she might have started screaming right there and then, embarking on the lurch into dementia with no further ado.

She had assumed that the long wearisome drift into the void would be one of uniform, uneventful tedium. But then the flames appeared, directly in her path at the edge of the void, and she had to revise that idea.

Danbhala La Flambeau had called to Jim as he started along the path of the spiral. “Whatever happens, don’t stop until you reach the center. It’s vitally important that you don’t stop under any circumstances.”

Jim had almost stopped right there and then. His first reaction was to get the hell out, and fast. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to get the hell out to, so Jim continued along the curve of the ancient paving at a reserved saunter. If he couldn’t escape, he was probably best advised to do like Danbhala La Flambeau had told him. On the other hand, he saw no sense in rushing to whatever awaited him when he’d finished traveling this series of ever-decreasing circles.

As Jim completed his first half circle and the path led him past and away from the standing stones, the other gods started to arrive. Some arrived in custom variations of the giant limousine that had brought Jim to the standing stones—Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and Hirondels, a Cord and even an enormous Packard Patrician. Others came by more outlandish means. Marie-Louise, a frail and incredibly old woman in a mantilla and black lace shawl, drove up in an ornate open phaeton, with skeleton driver and footmen and drawn by six black horses, all wearing plumes as though for a funeral. Sarazine Jambe and Clairmesine Clairmeille both appeared in entities of pulsing, revolving light like the one that had, all that time ago, brought La Flambeau, Hypodermic, and Tonnerre to Doc Holliday’s township. The frighteningly beautiful ErzulieSeverine-Belle-Femme insinuated her presence into the area in something similar, a scintillating, undulating, and sinuously dancing aura of perfumed sexuality made glowing, dancing energy. The military
form of Ogou Baba, dressed in the white cloak and spiked helmet of a Mamluk, with a gold saber hanging from his belt, rode up on a stamping, snorting, black-as-night stallion. Captain Debas thundered in, kicking up gravel, on an antique Norton motorcycle.