by Mick Farren
Jim frowned. “Is that why you never just set down one of your ships on the White House lawn and said, Take us to your leader?”
Bogart leaned into the exchange. “Listen, buster, that wasn’t our idea. All the lies and deception came strictly from your end. You think we wanted to be dismissed as marsh gas, flocks of birds, and weather balloons? We were quite ready to go live on Ed Sullivan or Face the Nation and reveal ourselves to the world. We even had a guy at William Morris, but Hoover had a shitfit and Truman vetoed it. It was those sons of bitches that wanted us to do the whole Area Fifty-one covert ops bit, in and out of the back doors of the Pentagon all the time, the interplanetary fifth column selling ray guns to the natives. They claimed that irrefutable proof of life elsewhere in the universe would freak the living shit out of the Arabs, the Bible Betters, and the Hasidic Jews; for all they knew, the Pope might resign unless he could come up with a good reason God had never warned him we were out there. Kennedy was okay with it, but look what happened to him. You know some of them even tried to blame us for that shit in Dealey Plaza?”
Jim held up a hand. “Hold it a minute. Are you seriously telling me that the William Morris Agency knew all about you?” Bogart nodded. “At least a month before the FBI.”
“You were going to go on Ed Sullivan?”
“It worked for Elvis and the Beatles.”
Jim shook his head ruefully. “It never worked for me.”
The doctor alien made a dismissive gesture. “That’s because you had to be the petulant rebel and keep in the drug reference. I mean, they warned you, didn’t they?”
Jim saw he was making no headway. “I’m not one of your abductees, you know?”
“We are well aware of that. You came aboard uninvited and of your own free will.”
“So just drop me off at the nearest accessible spot and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
The alien doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”
“I could incapacitate your warp drive with ectoplasm.”
Although the doctor alien had no mouth, Jim could have sworn that he sneered. “We don’t have a warp drive. That’s also Star Trek. Now who’s conning whom?”
Because they had no iris or pupils, it was impossible for Jim to tell exactly where the big alien eyes were looking, but he had the distinct impression that they had left his face and were now staring past him into the darkness. A moment later, as if in confirmation, he heard the patter of tiny feet coming toward him, the patter of dozens of tiny feet.
Semple was more helpless than she could ever remember. The chair in which she sat could have been in any dentist’s office except for the padded restraints; no dentist would have secured her body with a tightly cinched belt around her waist and an equally tight crisscross of webbing across her chest that kept her from moving her shoulders and upper body. No dentist would have fastened her ankles to the footrest of the chair to prevent her from kicking out, or locked her skull in a steel clamp, or placed a rubber gag in her mouth so she was unable to utter a sound. Semple’s fear was off the scale. The outward trappings of this were definitely medical. The small lab was bright and scrupulously clear, all white surfaces, gleaming stainless steel, and glass cabinets. The individual in charge was even referred to as the doctor, though the intention of the operation that this so-called doctor was about to perform was nothing but gratuitous and agonizing torture.
Had Semple been a different person, had she retained some of Aimee’s guilt when the siblings split, she might have made use of the time while she waited for the worst to happen regretting all the pain that she had just as gratuitously inflicted on others. In some ways, her own torturings were less morally excusable than that which she was about to receive. At least Necropolis had a system, no matter how diseased; Fat Ari was just trying to make the equivalent of a buck. The suffering she had inflicted on the unfortunate angels, cherubs, and wandering spirits who had fallen into her clutches had been strictly for her own bored and private amusement. In that, she was equally as culpable as Mengele, maybe more so.
Semple, however, was made of sterner and much less repentant stuff. Even with no gag in her mouth, she would never have considered making any promises of atonement. Her only words would have been vitriolic, obscene, and abusive, directed at the doctor and his assistant, at Fat Ari, at the cops who had arrested her and all the others who had conspired to bring her to this place of degradation and promised pain. Helpless as she was, Semple still flexed her muscles against the restraints and bit down angrily into the hard rubber of the gag, determined that, when the awful moment came, she would give no one the satisfaction of seeing her cower.
The awful moment turned out to be a long time coming. Soon even the doctor began to grow impatient. He frowned vexedly at his assistant, who was bent over a wheezing computer that leaked wisps of vapor from bad seals in its microplumbing. “What the hell is the problem? This is a straightforward branding. It’s not supposed to take all day.”
“It’s the morons at Public Records. They’re making a whole performance about assigning me a number blank.”
“Fat Ari wants this unit back before his ridiculous show goes on the air.”
The assistant hit a sequence of keys. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”
“And we have a cheek-and-jowl job booked in twenty minutes.”
“I’m aware of that too, Doctor.”
“Then damn well get on with it.”
Semple swiveled her eyes and tried to turn her head to see exactly what was happening, but the steel plates clamping her skull made movement impossible. The eternally springing hope of the condemned suggested that maybe, if the delay was long enough, Fat Ari would give up on her and the branding would be canceled. She was enough of a realist, though, to know in her heart that this would never happen. If she missed the show, they’d brand her out of pure spite and hold her for the next one. On the way in, she had taken a good long look at this character everyone called the doctor and recognized on sight that his personal glacier of sadism ran cold and deep. He did even the most rudimentary things with a precise, perfectionist attention to detail, and Semple suspected that he had enjoyed maybe more than one lifetime honing his sinister act.
She had also observed that the doctor, like Fat Afi, was not required to dress up for a night on the Nile. His white lab coat covered and protected the neatly creased pants and fully buttoned vest of a trim, ultraconservative, 1930s-style three-piece pinstripe suit. His hair was pomaded and brushed straight back, his fingernails immaculately manicured, his black oxfords buffed to a mirrored sheen, and his wing collar rigidly starched. The doctor’s dapper and almost obsessive cleanliness made the horror of her situation somehow worse, even if Semple couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.
After a further five minutes, the assistant turned from the computer in discreetly weary triumph. “I have a number, Doctor.”
“And about time. Is the matrix heated?”
The assistant nodded. “It’s white-hot.”
“Then conform the bars and let’s get this nonsense over with.”
Semple could smell hot metal, and her stomach convulsed against the webbing. Despite her try for iron control, she was going to throw up.
“The brand is ready, Doctor. I’m removing it from the heater.”
The doctor entered Semple’s limited area of vision. He leaned over her, exuding a ghost-odor of cologne and breath mints. He lightly pinched the skin of Semple’s forehead between a pale, antiseptic thumb and index finger, and when he spoke, Semple knew he wasn’t talking to her. “It should take a good impression. I foresee no problems here.”
No sooner had he spoken than the computer on which the assistant had previously been laboring hissed, belched, then let out a mechanical Klaxon howl. Semple couldn’t see the assistant, but his voice sounded awed. “That’s the call of the Lord Anubis himself.”
The doctor was merely irritated. “It’s been a while since the Fiihr
er saw fit to interrupt me.”
Now the assistant sounded frightened. “Please, Doctor, we could all be in trouble if you were heard calling him that.”
But the doctor cut him off. “Don’t worry. There are no listening devices here. I made sure of that when I allowed the dog-headed simpleton to set me up in his ridiculous city. I also have the place swept regularly for bugs. And not only for ones installed by him. I also have to be watchful for those who would steal my research.” The doctor moved quickly to the computer and hit a key. His voice took on a jovial respect. “My Lord Anubis. How nice. It’s been a long time since we spoke.”
The voice of Anubis was both huge and unreal. It gave the claustrophobic impression that it was not only filling the entire room, but using up all the air. “Has the outlander been branded yet?”
Semple swallowed hard. Now Anubis himself was getting in on her humiliation. The doctor replied briskly, “Not yet, my Lord. We have had some trouble with the records office. I’ll be through very shortly.”
The voice of Anubis again boomed around the surgery. “Don’t do it.”
The doctor blinked. “Don’t do it?”
“That’s what I said. Do we have a bad connection? Am I failing to make myself clear?”
“No, my Lord. You are abundantly clear.”
Semple couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was off the hook by a miracle. Never again would she ignore the eternally springing hope of the condemned.
“I want the outlander brought to me.”
The doctor sounded almost disappointed. “Unmarked?”
“Unmarked and unbranded.”
“I’ll have it done immediately.”
“Do that.”
“It’s been wonderful talking to you, my Lord. You must come here sometimes and inspect my work.”
But Anubis was already gone. Seemingly, Semple would soon be confronting him. Was this a rescue or merely a stay of execution reserving her for a worse horror in the future? She knew her wisest option would be to take refuge in the moment, and not even think about what the future might hold. Just rejoice that hot metal wasn’t at that moment searing her brow. Unfortunately, the dog god was all too central to the thematic operation of the city and she couldn’t help but speculate about him. Until now, she’d only seen pictures and statues of this figure who had taken the image and personality of the jackal-headed Egyptian god. Now she had heard his voice for the first time. Did the man always talk like that? Even when you were in the same room with him? Semple could only think that the voice was some kind of audio construct, like Tarzan’s bellow in the old Johnny Weissmuller movies. The Tarzan cry was reputed to have been a primitive overdubbing of an African bull elephant, a roaring lion, and a well-known yodeling cowboy. Working on the same principle, the voice of Anubis could have been digitally sampled from equal parts of Benito Mussolini, James Earl Jones, and late Elvis Presley at the full-stretch crescendo of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
The assistant was unstrapping Semple from the chair. After Anubis terminated the conversation, the doctor had stalked out of the room, plainly livid at the snub and miffed at the lost opportunity to inflict pain. As the assistant worked, he glanced around the room, as if unconvinced by the doctor’s assurances that no listening devices were planted in the surgery. He removed the gag and smiled a patently phony smile. “It’s a great honor to be summoned to Anubis.”
Semple massaged her jaw. She was in no mood for small talk. “Kissing up to the Big Boss, just to be on the safe side?”
The assistant looked at her plaintively. “Do be careful. They listen in much more than anyone thinks.”
Semple was in no mood for conversation. “Screw you, boy. You were just going to brand me.”
“I was only doing my job. It was nothing personal.”
“That’s what your kind all say. And don’t start telling me your fucking troubles, okay? Right now, I don’t give a fuck who’s listening. I was almost branded with a hot iron on my forehead. What the fuck else can they do to me?”
Despite her show of bravado, Semple was actually asking herself the same question. What the fuck else could they do to her? So far, this adventure had amounted to an unpalatable cocktail of Voltaire and De Sade. She knew what Anubis looked and sounded like, and she had seen some of the worst that the city he created had to offer. All inputs indicated that here was some mess of deep insecurities, overcompensating on a monumental scale. It did not bode well for their coming encounter.
As she finally stood up from the chair, Mengele returned to the surgery. He scowled at her. The doctor was also a bad loser. “So you’ve managed to elude my clutches?”
Semple flashed him a dazzling smile. “Better luck next time, Doc.”
The doctor didn’t smile back. His eyes hardened. It was as though a window had opened in some Arctic fortress of solitude. “Oh, there’ll be a next time. You can count on that.”
The lights dimmed to the blue glow, and Jim found himself surrounded by twelve or fifteen little gray aliens, two and a half feet tall, shorter than the doctor and the alien with the Bogart voice. They teemed around his legs like a bunch of eager, friendly children, as his mind was being inundated with cloyingly good vibes. Some were trying to take hold of his arms, others were feeling the rough texture of his cotton shirt, and running their little gray three-fingered hands over his leather jeans. Jim tried to move them back, shooing them away from him. “Hey, careful of the jeans, they’ve come so far with me they’re a symbol of my character.”
The little aliens refused to be shooed and didn’t appear to care about symbols of Jim’s character. They just twittered and chattered happily, making a sound between the wuffle of puppies and cheeping of baby birds, and the good vibes became even more saccharine. They treated everything he did as part of a marvelous children’s game. Jim found, however, that they were slowly and subtly propelling him in the direction that they wanted him to go. He was also aware that something else, something different, was in the room, along with him and the little aliens, something much bigger, cold, old, and malign, that observed without apparently wanting to be seen. Each time he tried to look directly at it, the little aliens ran interference, and the something-else moved out of sight, making use of the hallucinatory, inexact quality of the blue light to conceal itself. Jim’s only impression was of an elongated, equine, nonhuman head, long angular arms, and sinister arachnid motion. The word “mantis” came into his mind, but he didn’t know quite why, although the right side of his brain was definitely getting nervous. “Don’t trust these things. I’m telling you. You can’t trust them. Just think about it. If you were some ugly, unscrupulous space thing with tentacles and a see-through brain, and you wanted to create a false sense of security in another species, what would you do?”
The left brain considered this. “I’d disguise myself.”
“And how would you disguise yourself?”
Again the left brain considered. “I’d take on all the attributes of the young of the species I had targeted to screw over.”
The right brain was positively congratulatory. “Exactly, the big eyes, the frail bodies, the overlarge heads. They’re all calculated to make you feel protective and unthreatened. They’re all fetal decoys.”
The left brain had a question. “And what about the mantis thing?”
The right brain didn’t like the answer it was giving. “I fear that thing may be the real deal.”
The two halves of Jim’s brain reconnected, agreeing that he would no longer be buying the alien bullshit. Unfortunately, all the bicameral brainwork quickly proved wasted as Jim saw the table. It wasn’t like any operating table he’d ever seen, but there was no mistaking its purpose. The table was white and circular and had weird side trays holding laid-out instruments. Odd cantilevered devices were poised over it, ready to be swung into use like miniature cranes. The tools of the ET croakers were all fashioned from a highly polished, sapphire-blue metal, with odd, fluid configurations
like some Henry Moore nightmare, but no mistake could be made about their function. Down to the smallest clamp, they were designed for probing, penetrating, and implanting—the whole abductee workup. He’d been taken for a sucker. He stopped in his tracks.
“Okay, this is where I get off.”
He looked around for the Bogart alien but saw no sign of it. The nearest of the small ones took hold of his hand, but Jim slapped it away. “Listen, you little fuckers. My name is James Douglas Morrison and the shit stops here. No way are you getting me on that table. The closest I like to be to the medical profession is on the receiving end of a prescription for narcotics. Take my word for it, kids. Mr. Mojo’s rising.”
The little aliens started to back away. So far, hostility seemed to be having the required effect. Then he spotted one of the taller ones, and it wasn’t backing away. It was coming toward him, holding what looked uncomfortably like a weapon, pointed directly at him. When it spoke, he knew it was Bogart. “I don’t feel good about doing this, sweetheart, but you asked for it. You could have just rolled over and made it easy on yourself, but it seems we have to do it the hard way.”
Shortly after she had split with her sibling, Semple had developed the unconscious and annoying habit of compulsively judging her actions against those of the characters in old Joan Collins movies. Obviously she was looking for a way to distinguish herself as the antithesis of Aimee’s milksop blond purity. The problem stemmed from the time, before the split, when she was still working on her new physical persona. In the course of building her image, she had done an extensive study of Collins, starting with Dynasty and working backward all the way to the actress’s low-budget, British errant-teen roles in movies like The Good Die Young. Right after the split, her studies had meshed with the insecurity of being on her own for the first time, and she found herself hardly able to make a move unless she could relate it to a Joan Collins movie. It was almost as though she were using the actress as a sibling surrogate or an invisible friend. Semple had, of course, rigorously trained herself out of the habit, and kept the lapse a close secret ever after. When it suddenly resumed its grip on her as she entered the Throne Room of Anubis, she half concluded that it was due to the stress to which she had been subjected since her arrival in Necropolis. Whatever the reason, from the moment she entered the Throne Room, she couldn’t help but think of herself as being on the Cinemascope set of Land of the Pharaohs.