Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  “You seem to have formed a very precise opinion of me in the short time that I’ve been here.”

  “You aren’t the first to try to test the limits of her position.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “Of course it is. And even though I don’t particularly like you, I will give you one word of cautionary advice. Once the gloss of your novelty has worn off, you’ll need all the friends you can get.”

  Semple nodded and reluctantly lowered her feet to find the bottom of the pool. She knew that in her own way Zipporah meant well, but Semple was resolved not to be a part of Anubis’s harem long enough to find out what it was like to fall from favor. She climbed from the pool, waving away the handmaidens who were hastening toward her with a robe and towels. As she passed Zipporah, she communicated what she hoped was a certain measure of respect. “I’ll watch the bomb go off and make nice. I’m not looking to clash with you.”

  Zipporah acknowledged this as something akin to an apology. “I appreciate that, if you mean it.”

  Semple pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I mean it. There’s more to me than just overbearing self-indulgence.”

  With that she padded away to the dressing room, dripping water and trailing handmaidens, wondering all the way what kind of lunatic constructs and detonates atom bombs for his own personal amusement.

  “So, as you can imagine, I was feeling pretty bad by the time that kid shot me dead back there in that bar in El Paso. I mean, a man’s sunk damned low when he’s riding with a crew of pistoleers who can turn up at a wedding, gun down the groom, the best man, the bride’s father, and the priest, and then go on to rape the bride, the bride’s mother, the matron of honor, the six bridesmaids, and a couple of nuns who just happened to be passing, and then have no remorse or any real excuse ‘cept being in the fifth day of a week-long shitfaced mescal drunk.”

  Jim nodded. He was aware that the small Mammal with No Name hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone or anything but the carnivorous plant in a long time, and it didn’t bother him if he wanted to prattle on. “I kinda know how you feel.”

  “Of course, those were hard days. 1869—”

  Jim was amazed. “You’ve been in this swamp since 1869?”

  “Sure have.”

  Jim blinked. “That’s quite a sojourn.”

  “I had a lot of guilt.”

  “Even so, that means you’ve been here longer than Doc Holliday, and not had half as much fun, from what I can see.”

  “There aren’t many who have as much fun as Doc.”

  “You know Doc?”

  “Sure, I know Doc. We come from the same territory.”

  “I thought you got yourself shot in Texas. Doc was more around Arizona and Colorado.”

  “When I say territory, I’m talking more about time and ethos than the geography. Me and Doc were both good ol’ boys who headed west after the War Between the States. There were hundreds of us on the move back then. Talk about an evil season. A lot of them who went out West were crazy as a shitbug to start with. Sick and insane with seeing too much death, and knowing fuck-all except kill or be killed. I mean, after Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Pickett’s bloody Charge, what did anyone expect? No one had ever seen a war like that, my friend. We faced miniballs that could rip off half your arm at close to a mile, canister that could blow away a platoon of men with one shot. The world had never witnessed such a mechanical fucking slaughter. The first fully organized carnage of the Industrial Revolution. They say boys went crazy in Vietnam, but I’m telling you, Vietnam wasn’t dick compared with Chancellorsville. We lost as many in a bad afternoon as they did in all twelve years of Nam. After it was all over, and Bobby Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, we had homicidals and spooked-out psychotics wandering all over the Frontier for ten years or more. Some went after the Indians, like Custer and Sheridan, thinking a taste of genocide would lay the ghosts. Others, like the James boys and the Youngers, just went right on fighting the war—”

  “And others went on a mescal jag, gunned down the groom and raped the bride and her bridesmaids and all of the rest?”

  The mammal grinned and nodded. “You got it.”

  Jim and the Mammal with No Name were picking their way over the uncertain dry ground above the water level of the Jurassic bayous. While the mammal told its long and involved story, Jim was content to make the right responsive noises while gazing out at the new world in which he found himself. The worst of the mist had been burned off by a white sun that blazed in a mushroom-pink sky, and now he could see a great deal more of his new prehistoric environment. At the horizon, no less than three volcanoes belched smoke from a range of jagged, snaggletoothed mountains. Closer up, the place looked a lot like the Florida Everglades, though the plant life was further back down the evolutionary trail. The resemblance was, however, enough to remind Jim of all the trouble that had befallen him in Florida. Miami was where they’d arrested him for allegedly flashing his dick at the audience. The straight truth was, Jim couldn’t remember whether he’d done it or not. He’d been drunk and tripping, flying at altitudes so high that, if asked to testify on oath, he couldn’t have sworn in all honesty that he’d even been wearing pants, let alone deliberately unzipped them.

  A dozen or more large herbivorous dinosaurs seemed content to loiter, partially submerged, grazing on trees and bushes, while other, smaller reptiles splashed in the shallows. To Jim’s great relief, none of them showed anything but the most casual interest in him and the Mammal with No Name, and made no attempt to approach them. What bothered him more were the pterodactyls that circled lazily overhead. Although he suspected the flying lizards were meat eaters, the mammal assured him that they posed no threat. “Their eyesight’s so rotten, they never go after anything smaller than a horse.”

  Jim didn’t find this as reassuring as the mammal had intended. The little creature could well have been taking a speciescentric view of the situation. The pterosaurs might not have been able to see a furry little ground dweller, but Jim was considerably larger; a pterodactyl with decent vision might tag him as a tasty morsel. And so he scanned the sky to make sure none of the flapping leather-wings was drawing a bead on him, and felt a lot happier when their route took them under the shelter of spreading palms and conifers rather than along the exposed edge of open water.

  Although the reptiles mercifully kept their distance and their own counsel, the same could not be said for the millions of insects that flourished in the Jurassic. Great dragonflies, with wings spanning eighteen inches or more, scared the hell out of Jim by buzzing him at eye level; only when they failed to follow through with anything worse was he able to relax. The clouds of mosquitos, gnats, and midges, on the other hand, took a great deal more getting used to. They dogged the steps of Jim and the mammal every step of the way. They didn’t seem to bother the mammal, with its thick furry hide, but by the time the sun had reached its zenith they were making Jim miserable. One settled on his exposed left forearm and he squished it angrily. As he wiped away the smear of blood, he smiled grimly. “Steven Spielberg isn’t going to reconstitute any DNA from you, you son of a bitch.”

  The blood made him take yet another look at the pterodactyls aloft, and when he did, he noticed something decidedly unusual. The sun was moving visibly across the sky. Jim glanced down at the small mammal. “How long are the days in this place?”

  The mammal looked puzzled. “How long should they be? Same length as anywhere else. The Earth isn’t spinning any quicker, far as I know.”

  Jim stopped and peered into the sun, shading his eyes and squinting like Clint Eastwood at high noon. “Then why is it I can see the sun moving?”

  The mammal stopped in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”

  This was the third time that Jim had heard a warning “uh-oh” in much too narrow a time frame. Saladeen of the puffball Afro and jewel-encrusted teeth had uttered the first two, all too recently, when one of the Voodoo Mystéres had appeared in the
distance beyond Doc Holliday’s town. Now Jim could only guess what was coming next. “Trouble?”

  “We may have a slight problem with time.”

  Semple had known that Anubis’s nuclear fireworks display was being promoted as a big deal, but the size of the deal exceeded all her expectations. The actual detonation, as it turned out, was billed as the culmination of a twenty-four-hour Divine Atom Bomb Festival, throughout which Anubis intended to bask in the full glory of his own ego. The test itself was to take place in the desert some miles outside the city, but prior to that the God-King, his court, harem, retainers, praetorian guard, and half the Army of Necropolis would travel to the test site in spectacular procession, followed by more or less the entire population of the city: a public holiday had been declared to allow them to marvel at the triumph of their glorious monarch. Anubis, as fond of food as he was, had ensured that the entire event would be lavishly catered, all the way from the wine and delicacies that would be available during the course of the procession, through the picnic that would precede the detonation, to the massive al fresco feast and bacchanal that would follow.

  Before Zipporah outlined the itinerary of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival, Semple hadn’t been aware that Necropolis was even surrounded by desert. Nor had she known that the environment extended so far that it would take a full two hours for Anubis to progress in beatific splendor to the city limits. She was accustomed to Afterlife environments that were as superficial as movie sets, all facade, illusion, and trompe l’oeil; a construction that encompassed two hundred square miles of downtown slums and suburbs took her completely by surprise. She disliked the dog-god no less, but she had to hand it to him for going all the way with his megalopolis. It was only when the procession actually got under way, and she saw both the slums and the suburbs for herself, that she finally grasped the extent of Anubis’s obsession. Like Aimee’s Heaven, much of the city was a scrapbook of its mad lord’s favorite things.

  As was only befitting His Godhead, Anubis along with his immediate retinue was to ride in a special parade vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, of a design that combined elements of an art deco railcar, Cleopatra’s royal barge, and a spacecraft from the Alex Raymond Flash Gordon comics. On the morning of the festival, as she and the other wives, concubines, and handmaidens walked through the huge and echoing hangar this preposterous craft shared with the God-King’s fleet of dirigibles, the chatter of idle conversation dwindled to an awed silence. Either none of the other women had ever seen the monster before in all its gold-plated glory, or it had been specially constructed and decorated for the Divine Atom Bomb Festival.

  Anubis himself, who would, of course, be the last to arrive and board the craft, was obviously to take pride of place, seated on a throne on a raised quarterdeck at the stern of the machine, attended by the ever-present Nubian guards and handmaidens wafting long-handled fans and bearing the obligatory trays of culinary delicacies. The members of the harem would ride in front of their lord and master in the well of the craft, to gaze up at him adoringly. The prow of the ship, shaped like the vulture head of the lesser god Horus, was occupied by another squad of guards, police in full dress uniform, armed with far more serious weapons than the spears and scimitars of the ceremonial Nubians. Their heavy machine guns were capable of unleashing instant destruction on any section of the crowd who might prove threatening, unruly, or impious.

  The harem boarded the royal carriage by means of a mobile flight of steps. Semple observed that, as the women climbed aboard, the craft swayed slightly; and that it seemed to be floating six to eight feet above the ground, supported, as far as Semple could guess, by some Nikola Tesla system or perhaps an antigravity fantasy reminiscent of the vimanas of Gilgamesh. The more Semple saw of Necropolis, the more she became aware that the entire place was a galactic collage of fanciful minutiae. Semple had little time, though, to ponder the inner mechanics of Anubis’s ceremonial craft. Zipporah quickly clapped her hands, indicating that the harem should assume its position. The armed guards on the prow, until now busy shooting covert glances at the diaphanously clad concubines, radiating random lust from behind the visors of their helmets, stiffened to attention. Anubis himself was coming.

  The arrival of the dog-god constituted a mini-parade all by itself. Preceded by a formation of his Nubians carrying long gold-tipped lances, and followed by a gaggle of handmaidens, he rode to the craft in a litter borne by four strapping blond slaves. The Dream Warden walked beside the litter, and Semple groaned inwardly. She had half hoped their day out would be unencumbered by that potentially dangerous weirdo, but it was inevitable that the sinister robed figure should show up for the detonation of the Holy Bomb. As the dog-god climbed the steps, the women all adopted expressions of adoration. When he looked in Semple’s direction she smiled radiantly but muttered under her breath, “At least you can make the stairs unaided, you psychotic son of a bitch.”

  When Anubis was finally seated on his elevated throne and his court was satisfactorily arrayed around him, the craft started forward with a slight lurch that had some of the women reaching for handholds. It nosed its way out of the hangar and into the hazy polluted sunshine of a Necropolis morning. As it traveled, the keel rose to a height of twelve feet above the surface of the raised highway the procession would follow all way to the test site. Anubis may have wanted his people to see and worship him, but he obviously didn’t feel any need to let the common horde get too close.

  The procession itself was perhaps a quarter of a mile long. First up was a squad of the city’s rocketeer police mounted on big, smoke-belching Harley-Davidsons and World War II–Indians. The bike cops were followed by a massive sculpted bust of Anubis himself fashioned from reflective silvery material, borne on a float that moved under its own power. A human garnish of young women in Mylar bikinis and body paint was draped around the neck and shoulders of the bust, and crowded the plinth that supported it, beaming like beauty queens and strewing rose petals, coins, strings of good-luck beads, and other small trinkets over the heads of the organized multitude thronging the highway. The bust was followed by the first of four marching bands, short on tune but strong on cacophony. Comprised mainly of hammering copper-shell drums and big brass wind instruments, sousaphones and tubas, the bands produced a relentless metallic braying that seemed to set the tone for the entire holiday.

  Semple had hardly expected that Anubis would forgo the chance to put on a display of military power. Whenever a hole presented itself in the order of the parade, Anubis had filled it with dress phalanxes from the various regiments of his army. The clatter of the hooves of his plumed and cloaked cavalry vied with the grinding roar of ornately gilded battle tanks. Neither the God-King himself nor anyone in the massed crowds seemed embarrassed that the style and weaponry of the Army of Necropolis should span some three thousand years, and Semple wondered if she was the only one to whom the parade looked like nothing more than a small boy showing off his toys. Even the air above the parade hadn’t been neglected. Formations of biplanes and dirigibles moved lowly across the sky, while small solo aircraft left trails of hieroglyphics in colored smoke. Flags fluttered, banners waved, and huge tethered balloons, in the shape of eagles, vultures, dragons, and one bulbous inflatable ankh, floated overhead, an old-fashioned communist May Day procession in chaotic collision with Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

  The drawback of actually being in a parade was that, once the procession was on the move, anyone actually taking part in it had only a limited view of the proceedings. After a while, Semple, between smiling and looking as radiant as was expected of the God-King’s current favorite, stopped craning her neck to see what was going on up ahead or back behind the ceremonial craft and started looking farther afield, at parts of the city that she had never seen before. At first it was very much what she had expected—large, bombastically imposing, Egyptian-style buildings, once magnificent, now run-down and in need of paint and maintenance—but as they moved farther out, the architecture star
ted to change. The towering temples, commercial towers, and apartment blocks gave way to a seemingly endless sprawl of crudely constructed single-and two-story hovels, huddled together in what looked, from the elevation of the highway, to be insanitary and overcrowded neglect amid garbage, chaos, graffiti, and stands of wilted and apologetic palm trees.

  This endless acreage of slums only deepened the puzzle for Semple. Why would anyone live here? What misery-prone spirit would leave the Great Double Helix to be ghettoized in such a depressing and degrading hereafter? The only conclusion was that Anubis had deliberately created the millions of souls it so obviously took to fill all this sorry real estate. Was he really so driven by the need for glory that he surrounded the place of his dreams with miles of wretchedness and underclass squalor? Semple wasn’t attempting any moral judgment. She accepted that her own personal history left no room for condemnation of another’s fantasy. What she totally failed to understand was what percentage Anubis gleaned from all the pointless work and organization.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  A huge dinosaur flashed past, sprinting backward at alarming speed. Only Jim and the Mammal with No Name seemed to remain in one spot. The rest of the world was in sudden and violent reverse motion. The sun whipped across the sky in entirely the wrong direction, so fast that the alternation of night and day was turned into the rapid beating of a huge black wing. The mammal, its eyes made eerie by the strobing sunlight, stared at Jim with metaphysical resignation. “I think we have a time fuckup.”

  “A time fuckup?”

  “Right.”

  The mammal seemed to accept the situation as if it were eminently natural. Jim, on the other hand, had never experienced anything like it and didn’t like it at all. “This happen often around here?”