Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  Semple could only conclude that he was checking that the countdown to the atomic blast was proceeding without a hitch. The situation suited Semple perfectly. As long as Anubis was fully occupied with his scientists and atomic advisors, he wouldn’t be bothering his women. Semple imagined he would certainly demand sex once the bomb had been exploded, however it turned out. If the blast was a success, he would undoubtedly feel the need for carnal confirmation of his genius, and if it failed, he would require a violent venting of his rage. Semple didn’t want to think that far ahead. In Necropolis life could only be lived moment by moment, and at that moment she was happy to be left alone.

  She accepted a glass of a pale gold sparkling wine that tasted like overvoluptuous champagne: even though she normally had only the most meager interest in recreational eating, she couldn’t resist sampling some of the hors d’oeuvres. She surprised herself by taking an immediate and almost gluttonous liking to some tiny, wood-skewered cubes of marinated and stir-fried meat in a peanut butter sauce. At first Semple had assumed it was pork, but even through the heavy flavor of the marinade, it somehow tasted sweeter and had a somewhat different texture. Almost without thinking, she ate a full six servings and then felt a little guilty at her self-indulgence. She wondered, slightly horrified, if the ways of Anubis were starting to rub off on her.

  In addition to the food and drink, waiters were also making the rounds with baskets of dark-tinted visors and handing them out to the guests. Some, like Semple, simply held their visors, not wanting to wear them until they were needed to protect optic nerves from the first nuclear flash. Others, on the other hand, put theirs on, lending the gathering the air of an impromptu masked ball. One of the first to don a mask was Dr. Mengele, whom Semple had spotted across on the other side of the royal pavilion, and avoided to the extent of moving if he showed the slightest sign of coming in her direction. As a further reminder that the moment of detonation was coming, a fanfare of discordant trumpets, like those in the parade’s marching bands, seemed to come out of nowhere, followed by a booming voice that brought all conversation to a stop. “Zero minus sixty minutes and counting.”

  Hiking through the swamp in darkness was far harder than it had been in daylight. The Mammal with No Name seemed to have good night vision, but Jim found himself constantly stepping onto what he thought was dry ground, but turned out to be viscous sucking mud from which he had to carefully extract himself without losing his boots; every so often a reed bed would part under his weight, plunging him hip-deep into rank, brackish water. Fortunately, after about an hour of this stop, slop, and go progress, a full bulbous moon had risen from behind the broken teeth of the volcanic mountain range and given him a visual fighting chance. With the rising of the moon came the dinosaur chorus, a keening, booming, atonal calland-response that rang from one end of the swamp to the other as long necks, silhouetted against the skyshine and starfields, rose to their fullest stretch.

  Jim scrabbled, gasping and winded, up a fairly dry slope, and sat gratefully down on a fallen trunk. The mammal stopped in front of him and looked him up and down. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not only dead, but I’m starting to realize that I’m seriously out of shape.”

  “It’s not much farther to the house.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  The mammal was staring off into the distance, and Jim turned, following his gaze. The dry area, elevated well above water level, afforded a good nighttime view of the house and its surroundings. As far as Jim could tell, the structure stood on a similar raised area, surrounded by a grove of primal oak and plants that resembled giant celery, a half mile away across an expanse of iris, swamp grass, and black water. For the first time, Jim realized that the light he and the mammal were following was, in fact, a combination of five lighted windows, three down and two up, spilling their yellow radiance into the night and illuminating parts of the surrounding land and trees. There were figures moving around the outside of the place, and although Jim had no idea what kind of reception he might receive when he reached the place, he was at least reassured that someone was home.

  Anubis had finished, for the moment, with the Dream Warden, and now the hooded figure was engaged in a conspiratorial head-to-head conversation with Mengele on the opposite side of the royal pavilion from Semple. That her two archenemies were consulting wouldn’t have bothered her if they hadn’t repeatedly glanced in her direction. Their covert glares were more than enough to make Semple uncomfortable. The tied-back tent flaps of an exit conveniently presented themselves to her right, and she turned and walked toward them. She didn’t look back to see if Mengele and the Dream Warden were watching, but deliberately swayed her hips as she walked, in an obvious display of physical insolence. Let the bastards plot all they wanted. She was the dog-god’s favorite for the time being, and she would do her level damnedest to see the pair of them brought down before she was through.

  The exit she’d chosen led out into the open air, to a part of the exclusive royal enclosure right by the al fresco meat kitchens. She found herself amid the overpowering smell of roasting oxen, pigs, sheep, cattle, and other creatures that Semple didn’t recognize, plus entire racks of ducks and chickens, slowly turned on automatic chain-driven spits above glowing beds of coals. More buffet tables had been set up beside the field kitchens and one of the first people that Semple saw there was Fat Ari, awesome in one of his tentlike costumes, helping himself to a whole leg of roast pork.

  Semple’s first reaction was to avoid the slave dealer just as she had avoided Mengele and the Dream Warden. She was about to reverse course and move off in the opposite direction when she thought, what the hell? She had nothing to fear from Fat Ari. Why not sashay past him, demonstrating what she’d become since she’d been removed from his clutches? Too few chances for fun presented themselves in this benighted city; why not grab a few rosebuds of payback while she might? She drew herself up to her full height and assumed the carriage of the acknowledged favorite of the God-King. She sauntered toward Fat Ari.

  He recognized her right away. To Semple’s mild surprise, Fat Ari showed absolutely no sign of resentment. He looked up from his pig-leg meat, nodded, and smiled with only a hint of regret. “Guess you lucked out, huh?”

  Semple treated Fat Ari to a bright but slight favorite-concubine smile. “I guess I did.”

  Ari took a fresh bite out of his roast pork and continued to talk, generating a fine spray of spittle and fragments of flesh. “I would have sold you to some son of a bitch in the slums.”

  “I kind of gathered that.”

  “No hard feelings, though, right?”

  “None on my part. Did Anubis ever pay you for me?”

  Fat Ari swallowed what he was chewing. “Did he fuck. That psycho bastard never pays for anything he takes a fancy to. Claims it’s his divine right to help himself.”

  A number of passersby overheard Fat Ari’s heretical last statement and looked around in horror, but the slave dealer didn’t seem to care. His position in the hierarchy must have been so well entrenched that he believed he had nothing to fear. At that moment the trumpet fanfare rang out again, and the same booming voice intoned the countdown. “Zero minus thirty minutes and counting.”

  Semple supposed she ought to be making her way back to her assigned seat in the royal box. It hardly made sense to antagonize Zipporah by showing up late for the bomb. Right at that moment, though, she would have been quite happy to stay and gossip with Fat Ari. With the possible exception of his table manners, Semple found that she was starting actually to take a liking to the man. He might have been an overbearing bully, without consideration for anything but his profit margins, but at least he was honest about what he was; he seemed free of the usual Necropolis delusions and affectations. Raising the leg of pork to his mouth, he treated Semple to a calculating look. “In fact, I figure you probably owe me one.”

  Semple planted a hand on her hip and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Oh y
es? And how do you work that out?”

  “If it hadn’t been for me, you might still be rotting in the city jail.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, but I’m not sure it would be my way.”

  “So if I was to ask you to put a helpful word in the doghead’s ear, you wouldn’t be willing to do it for me?”

  “That would depend on the word and how I was feeling at the time.”

  Fat Ari looked at Semple as though she were a major disappointment to him. “You’re not forgetting where you came from, are you?”

  Semple was about to tell Ari that he wouldn’t believe where she came from, when she suddenly noticed that the crisp, slightly charred skin of his leg of pork was decorated with an indistinct but unmistakable tattoo, a faded scarlet heart above three hieroglyphs. Shock made her speak without thinking. “What the hell are you eating?”

  Fat Ari looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “Roast teenager, gorgeous. That’s the one redeeming feature of doghead’s compulsory parties. There’s always some human on the menu.”

  Suddenly Semple’s mind flew back to her recent feast of marinated mystery meat. Why the hell hadn’t she paid attention to Aimee back in Golgotha? “I’ve also heard he encourages the practice of cannibalism.”

  “I think I’m going to have to leave you here.”

  Jim looked at the mammal in amazement. “What are you talking about? I thought we were partners. I thought we were sticking together for the duration.”

  The final half mile to the old spooky mansion in the swamp had been the hardest part of Jim’s whole Jurassic journey. He had to stop and rest four times, and it was during the last that the mammal made his startling announcement. Jim’s immediate thought was that he’d done something to offend the creature. “Do we have a problem?”

  The mammal shook his head. His eyes were sad. “No problem. But I smell something that makes me think I ought to make myself scarce.”

  Jim looked around in alarm. “Smell? What do you smell?”

  “VC.”

  “VC?”

  “Viet Cong.”

  Jim couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You smell Viet Cong in a Jurassic swamp?”

  “There are groups of them all over this swamp. They seem to like it here.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not. I figure either they’ve made a camp close to the house, or they’ve been hired on to guard the place.”

  Jim was at a loss for words. “Why would the Viet Cong want to live in a Jurassic swamp?”

  The mammal gestured with his paw, the equivalent of a shrug for an animal with no noticeable shoulders. “You should know by now there’s no accounting for what folks do in the Afterlife. I mean, look at me.”

  Jim thought about this. “If there’s VC around, maybe I should get out of here, too.”

  “I doubt they’ll bother you. They only mix it up with the ghost grunts.”

  “Are there U.S. soldiers here, too?”

  The mammal nodded. “I’ve never seen them, but they leave their crap all over. Wherever they bivouac there’s a mess of cigarette packs, Coke bottles, empty Spam cans, and used needles. Of course, they could be fabrications, set dressing for the VC. Or they could both be third-party creations.”

  Jim felt bemused. “Why in hell would anyone in their right mind want to reproduce the Vietnam War in among the dinosaurs?”

  The small mammal’s lip curled. “Like everyone here’s in their right mind?”

  Jim sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, but why are you so worried about them?”

  “They might eat me. The story is, they look on my kind as a special delicacy.”

  Later, in retrospect, Semple was willing to accept that she may have overreacted to the sudden confrontation with cannibalism in Necropolis, but right then, in the shocking heat of that moment, revulsion boiled and overtook her reason. Fat Ari, however, was so engrossed in his disgusting snack that he failed to notice the expression of pure horror on Semple’s face, and he continued to talk with his mouth full. “You should try the marinated infant in peanut sauce they’re serving inside.”

  Semple’s horror doubled. Infant? Bile rose in her throat; choking it back, she spun away from Fat Ari, who looked up and blinked. “What’s the matter with you?”

  She was too near gagging to answer. Fat Ari stared after her in confusion as she stumbled blindly across the royal enclosure with a fist pressed to her mouth. Her eyes watered and she had trouble forcing the unholy contents of her stomach to remain where they were. The Necropolis elite stared at her curiously as she staggered past, but no one spoke or tried to intercept her, and most turned back to what they had been doing, assuming that she was nothing more than an early emotional drunk. It was only when she approached one of the guarded entrances to the enclosure that anyone did anything to arrest her mindless flight. One of the huge Nubians, assigned to keep the common herd from mingling with the God-King and his aristocracy, lowered his spear as Semple approached, barring her way with its polished wood shaft. “You can’t go out there, my lady.”

  Under more normal conditions, Semple might have been intimidated by the Nubian, seven feet tall and rocklike in his muscular perfection. Now the only thing that could replace Semple’s unthinking horror was unseeing rage. Her voice came out somewhere between a sob and a scream. “I’m Semple McPherson and I can do exactly what I want. And right now I want out! I want away from all these fucking cannibals!”

  At a loss, the Nubian decided the best thing was to repeat himself. “You really can’t go out there, my lady.”

  “I’m the Lord Anubis’s concubine. I’m his fucking favorite. Are you intending to stop me?”

  The spear remained in place, but the Nubian shook his head. “I can’t stop you from going out there. I will have to stop you, though, if you try to come back in. Admittance to the royal enclosure is strictly according to barcode. One may only enter the royal enclosure from outside if one’s barcode is on the list. And obviously . . . ”

  He nodded in the direction of Semple’s forehead. The goddamned barcode again. That thing was going to dog her every move until she was out of Necropolis entirely. But that was okay. Suddenly resolved, she snarled at the Nubian, “Remove that spear and let me pass.”

  The Nubian must have sensed that she was at the end of her tether, because he quickly returned the spear to it’s upright parade position. “I can only warn you again: you will not be readmitted.”

  Semple managed to get her voice under control. “That’s perfectly okay. I’m not coming back.” She glanced a last single time at the royal enclosure. “I think I’d rather have my eyes burned out than come back in here.”

  The Nubian’s face stiffened and he stood at rigid attention. Semple guessed he was less than comfortable around what he saw as a harem girl having a neurotic outburst and his only defense was to turn robot. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  She stepped past the Nubian and, as far as she was concerned, detached herself from the court of Anubis. At the same moment, the trumpets blared. “Zero minus twenty minutes and counting.”

  The mansion was close, and even in the moonlight Jim was able to make out some of its architectural details. Whoever designed the place had gone all the way with the Old South. A tall, porticoed, Gothic Graceland with flying buttresses and narrow conical turrets rose like a warning from its attendant grove of trees. Up close, the place was so threatening that Jim started wondering why he’d allowed himself to be talked into coming there. He was beginning to feel like Jonathan Harker approaching a Dixie Castle Dracula, and he wondered if the mammal was in fact some kind of elaborate serial prankster who, for his own mysterious satisfaction, took total strangers into the worst part of the swamp and then abruptly abandoned them. At first Jim had been saddened by the little creature’s departure, but as he drew nearer to the mansion and saw its forbidding exterior more clearly, his mood rapid
ly soured and he became sorely pissed off. Even the yellow light spilling from the windows was cold and unwelcoming. Folks who chose to live in the darkest depths of this ancient swamp hardly seemed the kind who would embrace a passing stranger.

  Jim caught his foot in a knot of submerged roots and nearly went sprawling again. He was about to start cursing when he heard a rustling in the reeds only a few yards away. Jim looked carefully around, but could see nothing. Then the rustling came again, and at once he knew it was being made by a human or animal uncomfortably close to him. He bent his knees and lowered himself, as silently as he could manage, until just his head remained above the water. The move didn’t come a moment too soon. Almost immediately, dark figures broke through the undergrowth in front of him, wading purposefully through the swamp water, weapons held high, with easy precise movements that only come from absolute knowledge of the terrain. The worst part was, they were coming directly toward him.

  As soon as Semple was outside the Nubian-guarded entryway to the royal enclosure, she found herself assaulted by the sounds and the smells of the masses. Out there in the poor people’s area of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival—in what might have been called the cheap seats, had there been any seats—the stench was a physical presence. Unwashed bodies, the halitosis of a multitude, the urine-feces-vomit stink that wafted from the improvised latrines, and the sour-grease reek of bad junk food all conspired in olfactory assault. To make matters worse, Semple immediately found herself an instant curiosity about to be elevated to sideshow status. A ragged, swarthy, and very drunk man in a filthy kilt and bolero lurched up to her and attempted to grope her. “Bitch, if you wanna go slumming, you could do a lot fuckin’ worse than go slumming with me.” The man seemed to assume she was some courtier looking for rough-trade thrills out in the country of the proles.