by Mick Farren
“It wasn’t like that all.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“It certainly wasn’t. I really don’t know where you get your ideas.”
Semple’s lip curled and her voice turned B-girl tough. “Same place you do, honey. Don’t forget, once we were one.”
Aimee said nothing, and neither did her sister. Semple was aware of the entrance of Igor, her diminutive butler with the popping amphibian eyes and high Germanic voice of Peter Lone. Igor was one of the few denizens of Semple’s domain whom she hadn’t constructed herself. He had arrived out of the blue, driven there by his own twisted, vice-laden fantasies, and since he served her with groveling devotion, she turned a blind eye to his voyeuristic skulking around in furtive observation of her tortures and abuses. He probably wished he were in the place of the angel. Semple let the silence run itself out, just to see what Aimee would come up with next. When Aimee spoke again, her voice had totally changed. Suddenly, as though a dam had burst, she was in tears. “Please help me, Semple, I have no one else to turn to. I know I’m obsessive, but I can’t do this on my own. I really can’t.”
Semple silently cursed her sibling. If Aimee started crying, Semple knew she couldn’t turn her down. It was her great weakness: she was a sucker for the crudely pathetic. It was all she could do to shut Aimee off with a fast provisional agreement. “Okay, okay, I’ll think about it.”
Aimee’s voice disintegrated into a suppressed sob. “You will? Then, we need to talk about it.”
Aimee recovered with amazing rapidity. “I thought we were talking about it.”
“Face-to-face.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I’ll meet you in Golgotha.”
“Does it have to be Golgotha?”
“You made the place, not me.”
Semple could feel Aimee take a deep breath before she answered. Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, the one sector that didn’t fit in the rest of her cutesy-poo Heaven. “Very well.”
“Then Golgotha it is.”
Semple had assumed the conversation was finished, but Aimee had another thought. “You’re always telling me how you need to get out more. This will be the perfect opportunity.”
This last remark was a low blow. Both of them only left their created environments on the rarest of occasions. Semple liked to pretend that she was ready for anything, but, deep in her being, she feared the territories beyond quite as much as Aimee did. She was unsure of herself in those environments that apparently stretched to infinity all around her cozy Hell and Aimee’s Heaven. Aimee, well aware of this, used it against her whenever she could, but Semple didn’t parry the blow. She wasn’t quite ready for another round of sibling conflict, and she just snapped at Aimee. “Like, just meet me in Golgotha, okay?”
No sooner had Semple hung up the golden phone than it vanished. She stood lost in thought. After a long lapse of quasi-time, one of the rubber guards began wheezing loudly. Semple turned and looked at him, then down at the angel. Aimee’s unexpected call had caused her to forget the matter at hand altogether. Semple found she’d lost all previous enthusiasm for continued abuse. She gestured impatiently to the rubber guards, pointing to the bound angel. “Just get rid of him.”
The angel struggled against his bonds. “Please . . . ”
“Or give him to Igor if he wants him.”
“No . . . ” The angel continued to struggle, but Semple had no time for his entreaties. “Do shut up. I need to think.”
An idea was already spawning in the blackest layers of Semple’s intricately devious mind. Oh yes, she’d find Aimee her creative force. She’d find her a genius, but he wouldn’t be the kind to put Aimee’s precious Heaven to rights. She’d find her sister some utter bastard, and see how she liked them apples.
When the music stops, watch out!
White horses moving through the fog
White horses moving through the fog
Tall white horses moving through the
fog Pale horsemen following a red-eyed dog
The old man in the blue-green watered silk suit who called himself Long Time Robert Moore was playing the blues with an inspiration that far surpassed anything mortal. Moore sat in the musicians’ corner of Doc Holliday’s cantina, right beside the upright piano. Ruby, the resident piano player, remained on her stool, but merely watched him, her big-knuckled hands never so much as straying near the nicotine-stained keys. Robert Moore sat bent forward in a hard wood chair, his pearl-gray fedora pulled down so it cast a black-hole shadow where his eyes were supposed to be. Gold flashed on his right hand as he claw-picked with unerring precision. Silver flashed in his left as the stainless steel bottleneck rode the strings. More gold and a lone diamond flashed in his mouth as he sang. Moore had long since hit his stride, and every now and again he registered the fact by allowing himself a faint but knowing smile. He was now into that zone where voice and instrument dovetailed as one, interwoven twin factors of a single intent. The urgent slide guitar figure hummed and spun, chimed like a funeral toll, and then coiled back on itself with the surety of a striking snake. The sound resonated from the instrument’s metal body and commenced a journey that took it, rolling and tumbling, beyond the boundaries of the room, out through the doors and windows and missing walls of Doc’s half-completed cantina, to run echoing down the street and across the surrounding desert’s wild sounding board, finally to return as eerie, delayed reverberation.
Jim Morrison sat on the wooden sidewalk of another unfinished building across the street from Doc’s skeletal cantina, willing to idle for the while, sprawled against an upright; with a half-full whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his left hand, he listened with something close to awe to the music that Long Time Robert Moore was creating. Back on Earth, such purity of tone and sheer intensity of volume would have been impossible without major amplification. Here in the Afterlife, the majestic sound simply flowed from Moore’s acoustic National steel with no visible assistance. Music in the Afterlife could approach the magically sublime, as pickers, unencumbered by physical limitations, were free to indulge total audio fantasy. But the sound of Long Time Robert Moore still remained profoundly exceptional. Jim was glad he had Robert Moore to keep him entertained, as he settled into comfortable drunkenness. He was drunk enough not to want to negotiate the crowd that had now gathered in the cantina, but sufficiently comfortable that he was content to do nothing but slouch on the sidewalk and listen, eyes closed, his mind riding the chords.
Jim had noticed that it was almost impossibly easy to get drunk in Doc Holliday’s environment, and he wondered if that, and the magnificence of the music, had something to do with the unique quality of the air. The air in this land of Doc’s seemed unnaturally pure. Jim had noted this immediately when he’d emerged from the cantina. Although it still vibrated with the aftermath of the daytime desert heat, the atmosphere had an alpine crispness. It tasted as though it had been filtered, liquefied, distilled, and then reconstituted with an extra shot of oxygen. This was Antarctic air, Center for Disease Control, laboratory-conditioned air. Jim was surprised and a little amused by the care Doc took over his air. It hardly seemed in character for a man who smoked both opium and black, rank, rum-soaked Cuban cheroots; who deliberately maintained his near-terminal, blood-hacking tuberculosis as a signature of personal style. Or did it? Maybe virgin-pure air was Doc’s one concession to the physical.
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is the lesson to learn?
A purple night had fallen over Doc Holliday’s environment and the lazy indolence of the day had given way to a promise of dreaming urgency. As the light had dwindled and even the crimson and burning gold beyond the mesas at the horizon had eventually faded to black, the cantina and the whole tiny town had started to stir with expectations of the night to come. Lola had vanished for a while and then reappeared in a scarlet flame
nco dress, matching shoes, and lipstick, with her hair in a mantilla. Lola’s red dress seemed to be the sign that the night’s festivities were open for business. Long Time Robert Moore had pushed back his hat and, with a sparkle of the diamond tooth that matched the wicked glint in his bloodshot eyes, opened the beat-up black case that contained the National steel. People Jim had never seen before converged on the cantina, hard-drinking men and women of the wild side who transformed the place from a sleepy afternoon refuge for wastrels to a juke joint so determinedly jumping that the eventual crescendo of what promised to be a cannonball night would bring either violent paranormal saturnalia or equally violent fistfights and gunplay.
Jim had been as determined as anyone else to go the dark distance and embrace anything that came his way. It was thus something of a surprise that he found himself flagging, taking himself out of the race to seek the sanctuary of a private bottle and a support to lean against. It might have been the air; it might have been a kind of delayed, second-time-around death lag, an aftereffect of his recent brush with the Great Double Helix. It might also have been the quantity of unidentified but effective drugs he had consumed for breakfast. Whatever the cause, Jim languished until the china-eyed black dog came up and spoke to him.
“Did you know that the electric chair at Parchman Penitentiary is painted bright banana yellow?”
Jim shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.”
The black dog nodded, its tongue lolling out. “Not many people do. It’s not something they publicize.”
Jim wasn’t at all surprised by the talking dog. He knew that people entered the Afterlife as dogs, horses, mules, and kittens, almost all of them able to talk. One guy had come through as a giant sea turtle the size of a Volkswagen; devoted Kafka enthusiasts sometimes faced life after death as giant bugs. The dog, however, had an odd look in its mismatched eyes. Jim decided his safest bet was to humor the animal. “I’d imagine it’d be something they’d want to keep quiet.”
The dog looked at him suspiciously. “Why should they want to do that?”
Jim hazily pondered this. “I don’t know. I guess I always figured that the electric chair ought to be a nice, dignified, judicial mahogany . . . mahogany with copper fittings, kinda like a coffin or the judge’s bench in the courtroom.”
The dog all but snapped. “Well, it ain’t. Least not at Parchman. You can take my word. It’s banana yellow. Layer upon layer of cheap banana yellow gloss enamel.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah.” The dog changed the subject. “You waiting for Doc?”
Jim shook his head. “No, just waiting. Hardly even doing that.”
“Doc’s down at the opium den. He don’t usually come out until things have started hotting up in town.”
Jim looked up with interest. “An opium den?”
The dog showed its canine fangs; Jim took the grimace to be one of friendship rather than hostility. The dog pointed its nose to the other end of the town’s single main street. “Sure, down there, behind the laundry. Beside where the whorehouse used to be.”
Jim pushed himself away from the post. All through his mortal life he’d dreamed of going to a real old-fashioned opium den. He had almost made it to one in Paris, but his death had ruined that plan. “Are you kidding me? An opium den? A real, all-the-way, Chinese opium den with bunks and fans, and guys with pigtails cooking the pipes?”
The dog nodded. “The whole fortune cookie, plus John Coltrane and Miles Davis on the sound system. It’s run by a guy called Sun Yat.”
“No shit.”
The dog looked at Jim intently. “Before you ask any more questions, you could offer me a drink.”
Jim looked down his bottle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think dogs drank.”
“This one does.”
Jim frowned. “I never fed whiskey to a dog before. How exactly do I do it?”
“It’s easy. Just put the neck of the bottle in my mouth and start pouring. Just don’t pour too fast or I drool.”
The timing of the pouring process required more skill than Jim had imagined, and buying a dog a drink proved a messy and wasteful transaction. A considerable quantity of liquor ran out of the side of the dog’s mouth, dripping on the ground and on Jim’s leather pants. This in itself didn’t worry Jim overmuch. Plenty of booze had been spilled on that pair of pants. He just didn’t like to be thought of as a sloppy drunk, especially when he wasn’t the one doing the slopping. When he finally took the bottle from the dog’s mouth and wiped the booze and dog spit from his leathers, he saw the liquor level had gone down considerably. The dog braced its legs and shook itself, producing a fresh spray of saliva. Finally the dog swayed slightly and growled contentedly. “Damn, but I needed that.”
Jim had never seen a dog sway on its feet before. At the same moment, a lone rider moved slowly down the street, a strangely insubstantial figure wearing a ragged Civil War uniform, bowed over in the saddle of a pale and exhausted horse. Jim glanced quickly at the horse and rider and decided that he didn’t even want to speculate on their story. He turned back to the dog and gestured toward the opium den. “If I wanted to go to that place, what would I have to do?”
The dog was noticeably slurring now. “Well, you don’t just go walking in the front door. That’s for sure.”
“I need to be introduced to Sun Yat?”
“It’s not even as easy as that.”
“It isn’t?”
“The truth is that it’s all down to Doc’s whim. And you better believe me, Doc has his whims.”
Jim sighed. “I’d sure like to get me some of that opium time. I could handle laying in the rack and just drifting and dreaming.”
The dog grinned. “I heard that Doc drifts all the way back to Earth in his opium dreams.”
Jim nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed? I really could handle some of that.”
The dog wasn’t exactly encouraging. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If Doc likes you, you’ll get an invite. If he don’t, you won’t be around long enough to need one.”
Jim didn’t want to hear what happened to people to whom Doc took a dislike, so he turned the direction of the conversation a couple of points sideways. “You said Sun Yat’s place was next to where the whorehouse used to be?”
“That’s right.”
“So what happened to the whorehouse?”
The dog laughed. “Oh, the house is still there. It’s the whores that are gone. They all got religion and moved on. You know what whores are like when they get religion. Some say it’s because they spend too much of their working life staring up at Heaven.”
Jim didn’t know what whores were like when they got religion. All the whores he could remember had pretty much remained whores, except the ones who switched careers to become junkies, but he let it pass. “So where did they go?”
The dog shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Rumor was that they split to some holier-than-thou ectosector run by this broad calling herself Sister Aimee.”
“Sister Aimee?”
“That’s what I heard. Seems she’s got a place set up way down yonder, like some Sunday school heaven.”
Jim thought about this. “Didn’t Doc kinda take it amiss?”
The dog frowned. “Why should Doc worry?”
“Didn’t he create the whores in the first place?”
The dog looked at Jim as though he were an idiot. “Hell, no. Doc didn’t create too much of this.”
Jim was surprised. “He didn’t?”
“Well, I mean, he made the buildings and stuff, but you can see how much trouble he took with those. Dr. Caligari lavished more care on his cabinet.”
Jim looked around. Most of the buildings were unfinished in some way, leaning on each other at disconcerted angles.
“Goddamned things are held together with nothing more than faith and baling wire,” the dog continued. “I gotta tell you, I don’t even feel safe pissing on them when Doc’s not paying attention. It’s a miracle t
hey make it from one day to the next, but Doc doesn’t exactly cotton to making things too solid.”
“But what about the people?”
“Doc didn’t make the people.”
Jim was having trouble getting a handle on what the dog was saying. “No?”
“He didn’t make you, did he?”
Jim was still confused. “No, but I assumed—”
The dog cut him off. “Don’t come around here assuming, boy. This is not a place to be making assumptions. Doc strongly disapproves of dreaming up people just to act as extras in the fantasy. It’s like he always says, ‘If you can’t attract a population of real folk, then fuck you.’ Doc thinks cookie-cutter populations tempt the psychos and sadists.”
“So how did all these people get here?”
The dog looked at him impatiently. “Listen, if I gotta be the goddamned talking guidebook, you could at least give me another drink.”
Jim held up the bottle. Little more than an inch and a half of whiskey left in it. He looked at the dog. “If I give you a drink, it’ll kill the bottle. You fucking spill half of it.”
“So you get up and go over to the cantina and get another one. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is I’m not sure I can walk.”
The dog regarded him bleakly. “Of course you can walk. You just don’t want to make the effort.”
The dog’s attitude was starting to piss Jim off. “So why don’t you go and get your own bottle? You’ve got four fucking legs.”
It seemed that Jim was beginning to piss the dog off, too. Its voice took on an aggrieved snarl. “It’s hard to carry a fucking bottle when all you’ve got is paws.”
Jim didn’t need to be snarled at by a damned alcoholic dog. “Maybe you should hang a barrel of cognac around your neck like a fucking St. Bernard.”