by Mick Farren
“I’m over here, aren’t I?”
The voice was coming from a tall clump of vegetation that ran rampant between two willows. The plant or plants were like nothing that Jim had ever seen before. Three elongated, open top gourds stood together in the middle of a base of fleshy green and yellow leaves, and a long, whiplike tendril extended from the mouth of each gourd. Jim could still, however, see no sign of the frog or any other creature from which the voice might emanate.
“Why don’t you show yourself?”
“You’re looking straight at me. I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”
Jim noticed that, each time the voice spoke, the lower leaves of the plant rubbed against the gourds in exact time to the words. A look of incredulity came over Jim’s face. “You’re the plant?”
“Why shouldn’t I be a plant?”
It was a reasonable question, and all Jim could do was shrug. “No reason, I guess. I just never met a plant that talked before. Also you sounded so much like a frog.”
“It puts the real frogs at their ease before I eat them. It gives them the illusion they’re dealing with one of their own.”
“You eat frogs?”
“Never met a plant that ate meat before?”
Jim nodded. “Sure. I had a Venus’s-flytrap when I was a kid, but—”
“Strictly small-time.”
“Are you telling me you’re a carnivorous plant?”
“You have a problem with that? A vegetarian or something? I have to tell you, vegetarianism looks very different from my perspective.”
Jim took a step back. “I’m not a vegetarian.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Jim took another step back. “But how do I know you’re not going to eat me?”
One of the tendrils made a gesture as though such a suggestion was close to insulting. “You really think I’d eat someone with whom I had just been talking?”
“You talk to the frogs before you eat them. You just told me that yourself.”
“Yes, but you’re not a frog, are you?”
“That’s true.”
“So come closer and tell me all about your adventures with the aliens.”
Jim didn’t move. “I think I’ll just stay where I am for the moment.”
The tendril stiffened as though offended. “You don’t trust me?”
Jim drew himself up to his full height and adopted a cool pedantic tone. “I seem to recall that most carnivorous plants I ever heard about feed by luring their prey into reach, either by the enticement of scent or color or by some kind of sugar excretion.”
“You think I’m trying to lure you to your doom with witty and urbane conversation?”
Jim nodded. “It’s a possibility I have to consider. I mean, you can hardly blame me for being cautious, can you? I may not be a frog, but I’m just as edible. More so, in fact, considering I’m larger. You’d be happily digesting me for a week.”
The plant sounded offended. “That does rather put me in the same class as tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Believe me. If I saw a tyrannosaurus rex, I’d run like hell regardless of what it might say to me.”
The tendril made a limp curling gesture; Jim would have sworn the plant was pouting. For such a rudimentary limb, it was able to manage a high degree of expression. “I have to tell you that your suspicion makes me very unhappy. Especially after I helped you find your way out of the swamp and onto dry land.”
As guilt trips went, this was pretty effective. Jim almost felt compelled to approach the plant as a sign of trust. Before he could take the first step, though, another voice came from behind him. “Don’t believe a word it’s saying. That overgrown weed is a consummate con artist. It’s been trying to get me for years.”
The voice came from a small mammal, about the size of a raccoon, that sat on its hind legs on one of the tussocks of coarse swamp grass. The creature resembled a lumpy combination of hamster, prairie dog, and potbellied pig. Jim looked down at the little animal. “You really think he’s going to eat me?”
The animal nodded. “If he gets half a chance. He’s trying to sucker you in with that phony Brit accent. He wants everyone to feel sorry for him, but the truth is, he’s like all the rest of us here, except the dinosaurs—another dead asshole one jump ahead of a bad reincarnation. I mean, take me, for example. My species doesn’t even have a name. Nobody ever found so much as a fucking fossil’s worth of us.”
Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes and scratched the back of his neck. The mud was starting to dry and his skin itched. “I’m sorry.”
The animal’s expression was ruefully resigned. “Don’t be. I wanted to be a giant sloth, but I miscalculated by a couple of million years and came out a distant ancestor. Sometimes I think I ought to let one of them eat me and start all over again, but then I think, fuck it, maybe I’ll wait for the asteroid to wipe them all out. I’d definitely like to see that.”
“The dinosaurs?”
“Who else?”
At this point, the carnivorous plant interrupted. “I’m sure you mammals have a lot to talk about, but—”
The odd little mammal looked bleakly at the plant. “You’ve had your shot, now can it,” He turned back to Jim. “My suggestion is that you head for the big house.”
“The big house?”
“The big old run-down mansion in the swamp, with the trees all around it and the Spanish moss. There’s a rumor that Elvis lived there for a while before he moved on.”
“There are people living there?”
“Sure there are people living there.”
“What kind of people?”
“Buncha weirdos. Kind of people you’d expect to be living in a big old spooky mansion in a Jurassic swamp.”
Jim didn’t know if he really liked the sound of this. On the other hand, first impressions could deceive. Doc Holliday’s little town had seemed pretty promising, until the Voodoo Mystéres had shown up and Doc had eighty-sixed him. Perhaps an uninviting mansion might have compensatory depths. While Jim was considering the idea, the carnivorous plant tried to butt in again. “Listen, this is all very nice but—”
The small mammal snarled at him. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up. You know you ain’t going to get your tendrils on either of us, so forget it.” The mammal glanced up at Jim. “Unless you want to get eaten and use that as a way to get back to the Great Double Helix and start over? I actually wouldn’t recommend it. I understand it takes him a day or so to digest something as big as you. Whether you’d be conscious or not is another matter. I can’t speak from experience, but—”
Jim quickly cut him off. “The matter of digestion already came up.”
The mammal glared at the plant. “Then that’s that, isn’t it?”
The plant’s leaves blushed; its tendrils quivered and retracted into the gourds. The small mammal shrugged. “I guess we’ve heard the last of him for a while.”
Jim had made up his mind. He would try to find this mansion in the swamp. From his standpoint it at least seemed like an even bet. The way his luck was running, it would probably be no cakewalk, but it might also provide a way out to a more convivial and civilized place. He needed time to ponder the encounter with the mysterious dark-haired woman, to work on salvaging his lost recall. Even though the memory was nothing but gossamer fragments, he was becoming increasingly convinced she was more than merely a random erotic hallucination. “So how do I find this old house? Preferably by a route that doesn’t involve too much wading through dirty water.”
“I’ll take you and show you, if you like.”
“You would?”
“Sure. Beats sitting around waiting to be a dinosaur’s breakfast.”
It had been more than a week, if such terms made sense anymore, and Semple had failed to send word back to her sister. To say the least, Aimee was far from pleased. On one level, she was actually concerned about Semple’s well-being; it was hard to shake the fear that her sister’s
silence was the result of some mishap or accident. Although Semple was able to erect an impressive facade of bravado, and held in pretty high regard both her own beauty and her genius, she suffered from a lack of foresight that rendered her incapable of calculating the future effects of her actions. She was a total impulse victim, and her incurable habit of leaping without looking, just the way she had leapt the wind to Necropolis, had resulted in a history of trouble that had dogged her on the lifeside and in the time since their death and separation.
Recalling all the incidents caused by Semple’s impulsiveness, though, was usually enough to transform worry to fury, and Aimee soon began convincing herself that nothing was wrong with Semple at all. She was merely off on some self-gratifying adventure, with Aimee and her mission long forgotten. Even Aimee’s anxiety regarding Semple’s health and safety wasn’t without an ingredient of self-interest. They had never managed to discuss it, but both sisters were deeply obsessed by the question of what might happen should one of them be removed from this phase of the Afterlife, returned to the Great Double Helix, or suffer some other drastic fate. Whenever Aimee pondered the question, which had been often since Semple’s departure, she thought of those surviving Siamese twins who, when their lifelong companions died, were left with no will to continue.
Aimee’s dour mood may have had a second, more fundamental source. Semple’s absence had deprived her of certain fringe excitements, a backwash of tingling resonance from her sibling’s varied encounters, adventures, and random cruelties that served to satisfy latent appetites of her own. While she would never admit it, she had come to derive a sustaining enjoyment from these vicarious feelings and she longed to have them back in her life.
Semple’s silence, however, was only one of Aimee’s problems. Strange things had begun happening in her Heaven. Whether these incidents were somehow related to Semple’s absence was hard to say. They had started soon after her sister’s departure for Necropolis, but Aimee couldn’t see any logical connection even though she was well aware that, in the hereafter, logic could be highly twisted. Of course, there had been strange occurrences in her Heaven before, but back then she had been able to blame them on Semple and her nasty pranks. With Semple gone, Aimee was left with no one to blame—and also no solid explanation for all the bizarre extranormal phenomena. At first, when it had just been merely a matter of lights in the sky and unaccountable frogs, Aimee had thought briefly that Semple might be trying to drive her mad by remote control. Then the escalation had started. The sea monster had cleaved its way across the lake, rapidly followed by an all-day plague of six-inch-tall cartoon rodents wearing shorts, who walked on their hind legs and ate everything that wasn’t inside a locked cabinet. With that, Aimee was forced to abandon the long-range nuisance theory. Sea monsters and cartoon rats just weren’t Semple’s style.
The UFO that had risen majestically from behind the ice-cream mountains one singularly neurotic afternoon had been the most spectacularly disturbing incident to date. Although it hadn’t actually done anything more than descend and hover over the lake, it had filled Aimee with a fear that, far from being in any position to enlarge and improve her Heaven, she was at risk of losing control of the place. The thing had simply hung there, dark blue and metallic, an inverted dish with a turret on top and three hemispheres below, radiating a sense of unease and impending failure. Just to complicate matters, one of the white-faced monkeys from Golgotha had appeared on the terrace unbidden, hopped up onto the flat stone lintel of the balustrade, and then proceeded to make odd rhythmic hand signals to the UFO. At the same time, a strange fleeting feeling had come over Aimee, as though her entire postmortem nervous system had been immersed in warm water. For the first time in her life after death, Aimee found herself on the verge of despair. She sobbed in a quiet, mournful voice, so low that not even the white-faced monkey would be able to hear. “Semple, please phone home.”
“Semple, you have to get out of the pool right now.”
But Semple didn’t want to get out. She had managed to arrange herself so that the most abused parts of her battered body were positioned exactly in the path of the bubble streams from the whirlpool, and she didn’t intend to move until she ceased to feel, both internally and externally, like she’d been trampled by a herd of wild elephants. She also didn’t want to talk to anyone. In the warm, rose-scented water, she found it was almost possible to recapture the sparse remains of the unique sexual hallucination that had gripped her during that first time with Anubis, and the memory of the faceless man who had figured in it. “Just leave me alone, will you?”
Zipporah’s lips pursed. She clearly had no intention of leaving Semple alone. “I’m serious, we only have two hours before we leave.”
“Isn’t it enough that I have to fuck him until I can hardly walk? I don’t even want to see his miserable bomb go off.”
Semple had hoped that the seraglio of Anubis would be a place of idleness and overheated lethargy, a hothouse of women with time on their hands and sex on their minds. Before she arrived there, she had conjured a vision of scantily clad wives and concubines, lounging beside perfumed crystal fountains between marble pillars, draped with gold and sheer silk, eating bonbons, watching TV, exchanging razor-edged gossip, red in both tooth and claw. The reality turned out to be a little different. Sure, the fountains and the marble were there. Anubis missed no measure of architectural opulence. The bonbons were served on silver dishes and satin and brocade cushions made lying around and watching the many triangular television sets a far from arduous task. Superior cats slept, played, licked their paws, and stared from vantage points on the backs of sofas, revered as they had been in historical Egypt. The interaction of the women, however, transcended mere gossip, no matter how vicious. What went on in the seraglio was full-blown political intrigue, from elaborately planned character assassination to highly organized espionage and even the poisoning of rivals. With Anubis functionally crazy, always continually in the grip of some new tangential enthusiasm, the day-to-day running of the metropolis almost totally depended on influence, bribery, and corruption. Although the wives and concubines were supposed to have little or no contact with the outside world, all manner of petitioners from all castes and classes managed to find access routes to the God-King’s women in the hope that they might use their influence on their lord and master.
The ultimate power broker and wielder of influence in this sequestered world was Zipporah, the Deneuvian primary concubine, who at this moment was berating Semple for lying too long in the comfort of the seraglio pool. “You have to be there. There’s no discussion about it. Anyone who doesn’t show will need an impossibly good excuse.”
“I have a perfect excuse. The bastard has all but crippled me.”
The expressions of the other women as they overheard this final retort registered not only shock but also the kind of covert satisfaction that came with watching a possible rival drop herself into deep trouble. Every inmate in the harem acted on the principle that each word they uttered would be overheard, recorded, and relayed to Anubis, and Semple could easily be digging her own grave by mouthing off. To call the God-King a bastard was a near certain fast track to the oubliette: the “forgetting place”, a set of tiny cells in a damp subbasement so cramped that it was all but impossible to lie or stand. Concubines and courtiers could be confined without food, water, or even light in the oubliette, in some cases until they went mad, withered, died, or reached some other approximation of the terminal state.
As Anubis’s current favorite, Semple did have a certain leeway regarding her behavior; the flavor of the moment could get away with a lot. But Semple was also coming to understand that Anubis’s relationships with his women were exactly like his tastes in food. The God-King would obsess on a specific delicacy, gorge on it continuously for a period of time, but then abruptly tire of it and either go on to some new innovation or return to the tried and tested. Semple knew that her ability to get away with open blasphemy had a very limited
shelf life.
Zipporah didn’t seem as shocked as the other women, but she stared down at Semple from the side of the pool with a knowing and world-weary expression. Without saying a word, she made it abundantly clear that she had seen them come and go, and Semple should take care while she could. “That won’t exactly qualify as a good excuse.”
“And what would?”
Zipporah smiled coldly. “Sudden discorporation might just get you off the hook, my dear. Short of that, I can’t think of very much else. Acting the spoiled brat because you’re the temporary favorite certainly won’t cut it. Remember this is only the master’s second atom bomb, and he’s very anxious about it. The scientists have all been threatened with slow extermination if it doesn’t go off totally according to plan, and I doubt if any of us would fare very much better if we failed to show up for the great event.”
The detonation of the second Necropolis nuclear device was Anubis’s current obsession. Although, as far as Semple could glean from the seraglio scuttlebutt, the thing was little more than a small and very dirty bomb, not even up to Fat Man magnitude, the dog-god was so taken with the idea of letting off his very own man-made sun that he was designing an entire holy event around the explosion: a religious festival of the highest order, a full, dawn-to-dark day dedicated to the glory of his divine cleverness.
“You’re not going to let me slide on this one, are you?”
Zipporah shook her head. “I doubt I’d let you slide even if I could. I want you out of that pool and into the dressing room in the next five minutes.”
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
Zipporah regarded Semple with a look that was, at the same time, both sharp and glassy. “No, I don’t much like you, but that’s hardly relevant. All that concerns me is that you’re difficult, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous. When you finally get yourself into trouble, as you eventually will, you’re quite likely to drop some of us in the excreta right along with you.”