by Mick Farren
“Is it true that Wes Hardin shot a man for snoring?”
“That’s how the story goes. But I wasn’t there, so I could hardly say for sure. I do know that Mr. Hardin was so all-out sociopathic that he’d kill his fellow man without even the courtesy of an excuse. A less oft-told tale is the one about how he carved a whore to dog meat for laughing at the size of his less-than-magnificent penis. She was a Hungarian harlot who called herself Magda, generous of mouth and thigh, but a little short on diplomacy when it came to what she found funny. That such a notorious desperado should be hung like a hamster was just too much for her, and I fear her amusement cost her dear.”
“You were there for that one?”
“Indeed I was, Jim Morrison, indeed I was. And an unpleasantly bloody business it was, too. I found myself tempted to call the son of a bitch out on the matter. I liked Magda, but sadly I didn’t like the odds. Mr. John Wesley Hardin was pure, true, and deadly, and he had an arrangement with a backshooter who went by the name of Nathan Charlie Christmas to give him an extra edge if confronted by the likes of me. I feared he would have bested me, so poor Magda went unavenged. Such is too often the way with whores, particularly on the frontier. I believe Mr. Clint Eastwood made a film about a similar incident.”
“The Mammal with No Name told stories like that.”
“He most probably would. His name was Billy Blue Perkins and he had a mean and violent reputation, all through New Mexico and well across the border, for being a nasty homicidal drunk. I never met the man lifeside that I recall, but I saw a wanted poster for him once after he and his jolly saucy crew had raped and killed some nuns at a wedding party. Funny thing, he kinda looked similar to how he looks now. Kinda weasely of face, if you know what I mean.”
“He’s real remorseful now. Seems to want to be eaten by a pterodactyl.”
Doc tilted his head knowingly and looked mildly contemptuous. “Not remorseful enough to let himself go all the way and be eaten, though.”
Jim had to think about this for a few minutes. Doc was emerging as a high absolutist when it came to matters of guilt and morality. “Either regret nothing or go all the way and take the beating?”
Doc nodded. “That’s always been my opinion, sir. For what small measure it may be worth.”
Jim wasn’t sure how much he agreed with Doc, but he was already a little too drunk to ponder the point. Instead, he changed the subject. “So who’s this Semple McPherson I’m going to find myself shacked up with in my relative future?”
Doc raised an amused eyebrow. “Curious?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Maybe.”
“You know her?”
“Maybe.”
“But you’re not going to tell me?”
“I think it’s something you need to find out for yourself.”
“It’s seems I’m predestined to meet her, though.”
“Who the fuck knows? I’d be the last one to claim that it’s all written and unchangeable. Your timeline seems so fucked up I wouldn’t bet bookmaker odds on anything.”
Jim frowned. He was about to start worrying like a terrier at the paradoxical bone of the distortions of time and fate; but then a pleasure boat, a veritable palace in white and gold, hove into view, way ahead upriver, but coming toward them. Jim adjusted the wheel to give the larger boat a wider birth. Doc nodded his approval at the maneuver. “Stay out of her wake, boy. I don’t want to get so rocked I spill my drink.”
He coughed three or four times. Jim couldn’t figure why Doc clung to his rotting lungs. “Are you ever going to do something about that TB?”
Doc shook his head. “I doubt it. It’s like a trademark.”
As the pleasure boat came closer, Jim marveled at its strange and luxuriously complex design, somewhere between a sculpted iceberg and a floating wedding cake, and far larger than he had first imagined when he’d seen it in the distance. It loomed over the launch like a small ocean liner, but like no ocean liner Jim had ever seen. Parts of it had the appearance of being constructed from custom-fabricated, translucent gemstone crystals, purposely and chemically grown but seemingly too huge to be plausible, especially with their heavy overlay of gold filigree and their surreal engineering. From out of nowhere, the phrase “crystal ship” jumped into Jim’s mind, and reverberated in the wreckage of his memory. Where the hell had he heard that before? He glanced around to Doc. “That thing scarcely seems possible. Like it shouldn’t exist, even here.”
Doc nodded gravely. “I’ll allow you don’t see too many of those. In fact, I wasn’t even aware he did boats. He usually sticks to dry land projects.”
“Who does?”
“Phibes.”
Doc nodded to the bigger craft, now almost level with them. His expression was one of weary disdain. “Yonder monster of overelaboration is a product of the excessively celebrated Runcible Phibes.”
Jim frowned. “Should I know about Phibes?”
Doc pushed back his hat. It was the teacher/pupil routine again.
“Runcible Phibes is the leading light of the post-logical school. Some say post-logicalism is the first truly indigenous art movement of the hereafter, but I fear I am not one of them.”
“Does it really float? Or run on wheels on the river bottom like those Pirates of the Caribbean boats at Disneyland?”
Doc snorted. “I’ve never yet laid eyes on Disneyland, boy. I was seventy years dead when that damned place opened.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect I didn’t miss much. A good friend told me once, and I totally trust his judgment, that Disneyland put him in mind of what Hitler would have wanted the world to be after he’d killed everyone he didn’t like.”
Jim nodded. “That’s definitely one way of looking at it.”
The mushroom cloud grew in Semple’s perception until it overwhelmed all else in the landscape. It seemed to be drawing her to it. Somehow its elemental force had managed to infiltrate her consciousness, as though it wanted to force her to join it, or at least to abase herself before it. It seemed to be talking to her, telling her it was the only symbol that remained for her, the Pillar of Cloud in the wildness, the Great Tree of Evil Fruit. She had almost called it the Tree of Life, but there was no way that the word “life” could ever be appropriate for this towering blossom of fundamental destruction, or the accursed place and equally accursed mind that had brought it into being. The only mercy was that, in running to it, she had left the Nubians way behind. Where most of the pursued had milled around and attempted to double back, to circle toward the city, Semple had carried on as straight and as fast as she could, directly into the desert. The ones who had tried to return to Necropolis had been sent bloodily to another place. The curve of the Nubian formation had surrounded them, the horns of the bull had closed, the golden spears went to work, and the victims took their leave of Anubis’s desert, to the pods with a final scream. As far as Semple could observe, she and the rearing atomic cloud were all that remained.
She looked back a number of times, just to make sure all pursuit had ceased, before she felt safe enough to stop running and attempt to catch her breath. It was only when she finally stopped that she realized just how winded she was. She leaned forward, hands on knees, eyes closed, bent double, gasping, with the circulation pounding in her head. Her legs were shaking and threatening to give out on her. For one fearful moment, she wondered if this heralded the onset of another bout of the melting horror, but her body managed to struggle back to normality and she slowly straightened up. For a brief time, this fear of the melting had pushed the influence of the atomic cloud out of her mind. As she reopened her eyes, she half hoped that it might have gone, borne away on some desert wind, but the mushroom of poison vapor was still in front of her, showing no sign of dissipating or even losing its shape. Indeed, the mighty fungoid head, atop its roughly cylindrical trunk, appeared to be expanding still, growing between her and the sun, so that a dark
shadow advanced across the blast-blown desert directly toward her. A new impulse suddenly entered her mind. She no longer had to go to the cloud. All she had to do was to wait for the shadow to come to her.
As far as she could tell, the outer edge of the cloud-cast shadow was maybe seventy yards from her, but it was moving quickly closer. It seemed to cover the desert at something well in excess of walking pace, and the seventy yards quickly dwindled to fifty, thirty, twenty-five, and the nearer it came, the more her strength ebbed, leaving her without the will to resist or flee. As it moved inexorably closer to the immediate ground on which she stood, she began to feel almost transparent, as though her very being were ebbing. What was this? Some bizarre new unknown ending? With the shadow just a few feet from her, she felt as though she could no longer breathe; her motor functions spun out of control, she was hot and then cold, her thoughts became randomized, without thread or pattern. She was scattering. She hardly knew who she was, even had doubts as to what she was. And then the shadow touched her and she became a part of the blackness that hid the sun. As a conscious being, Semple ceased.
Doc shaded his eyes and looked more closely at the passing pleasure boat. “I see they have their own shipboard entertainment.”
A dancer was performing for a small audience on the quarterdeck of the great white and gold river palace. All but naked, she turned, undulated, and pranced, legs lifted high in mock classic symbolic poses that looked to Jim privately like bullshit, having engaged in some similar bullshit himself back in the days of yore. The dancer’s arms dipped and waved, trailing a long chiffon scarf. Jim grinned at Doc. “Isadora Duncan disciple?”
“It could be the divine Isadora herself.”
“You think so?”
Doc squinted from beneath his hat, looking more closely at the dancer. “It’s too far to tell for sure, but it looks like her. If I just had binoculars powerful enough that I could see her mole, I’d know . . . ”
“You know her?”
“Isadora took a fancy to me once, way back down the road. I recall we spent a memorable three nights in a hot-sheet, yab-yum motel out on one of the caravan routes.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“As a gentleman, I surely can’t elaborate. It did seem, though, even back then, the manner of her death hadn’t done anything to put her off her taste for flowing scarves.”
“Isadora Duncan, huh?”
“Watch your course there, boy.”
They had passed the bigger ship now, but while Jim’s attention had been fixed on the dancer, he had allowed the launch to drift uncomfortably close to its backwash. He quickly adjusted the wheel and then took a final look at the dwindling form of the near-nude dancer. He grinned at Doc. “Three nights, huh?”
Doc pulled down his hat so his eyes were hidden. “Maybe, in some time yet to come, my boy, you’ll take this Semple McPherson to the same place. If you find yourself doing that, ask for a hostess called Shen Wu. She really likes her work.”
Jim didn’t smile. The idea of this woman who might be in his future filled him with both unrequited curiosity and a strange unease. He turned back to steering a straight course and did his best not to think about her. He knew that kind of obsessive thinking about something he could do nothing about was a guaranteed shortcut to neurosis.
While Jim was trying not to think about the mysterious Semple McPherson, Doc drank in the shade of his hat brim. Each in his own way was too absorbed to notice another, smaller appearance on the river. A hundred yards astern of the launch, the black upper lens housing of a submarine’s periscope broke the surface and peered unblinkingly in its direction.
“A woman is a better conductor of heat than steel.”
“What?”
“Aluminum is a better conductor of heat than steel.”
“I have to be dreaming.”
“A shaman is a letter seductor to cheat and steal.”
“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”
But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander; not exactly as lonely as a cloud, but equally ethereal. She knew, however, that this wasn’t one of those times.
“A hymen is abetting the reaction to beat and feel.”
“Stop this now!”
Semple seemed to be somewhere underwater, deep water; somewhere in the depths of a deep body of water, and the repeating, distorting, irritating voice had a deep, sewer-pipe, bubbling sound that bounced and came back at her like the ping pulses of sonar. “A dolmen is—”
“I said, stop.”
The repeating irritating voice changed. It suddenly sounded resentful, querulous. “But I go with the hallucination.”
“I’m trying to rid myself of the hallucination.”
Exotic, multicolored warm-water fishes swam all around her; above her head, a large object, perhaps a submarine or an aquatic reptile, moved purposefully between her and the rippling dapple-green light that had to be the surface of the water. Semple had known at once this was a hallucination. If the atomic cloud had actually somehow returned her to a primal sea of origin and rebirth, some unknown parallel of the Great Double Helix, she knew she’d be accepting it with a lot more resignation. In fact, all she wanted was to fight. She wanted to kick out and swim to the surface and scream in fury at whatever fate had precipitated her into this fine new mess. Moreover, if this were the Helix, she wouldn’t be so goddamned thirsty. Despite being entirely immersed, she was parched, her tongue swollen, her lips threatening to crack. She knew that to slake the thirst, all she had to do was open her mouth, but something told her with that first drink she would also drown, and be swept away to the Great Double Helix.
But how could she drown if she had no body? The realizations and revelations were coming thick and fast. In a flash she knew that the raging, illogical underwater thirst was the only corporeal aspect to this entire new episode. She looked down, or rather, she perceived down and saw . . . nothing, no legs to kick, no arms to power herself upward, no body to move. She seemed to be nothing more than a bubble of consciousness; and her consciousness had no buoyancy. All the time she remained submerged and without physical form, she seemed to be sinking deeper, until the light from above became a vestigial thing. The fish took partners, touched fins, and waltzed in these newly plumbed depths, their own luminescence providing passing mirror-ball highlights in their watery ballroom. She might have stopped to admire this circling aquarial tableau had she not been so consumed with fury; and yet the angrier she became, the faster she sank. “What the hell is going on here? Is this supposed to be some kind of torture? If so, what the fuck did I do? Whoever’s doing this, at least have the balls to show your goddamned self!”
This outburst finally took her all the way to the bottom, where she bounced leadenly on surprisingly hard and resilient mud, and then came to rest, an angry and misshapen balloon, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze from a tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Dark, submarine plants undulated around her with the current; she lay, helpless and immobile, like one more piece of discarded jetsam on the bottom of this unholy sea. Surely this wasn’t her final fate? Was she condemned to remain there, unable to do anything but gather silt and watch the fish dance?
“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”
But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander . . .
At the very moment her repeating thoughts began to circle back on themselves, the water miraculously started to fade. The hallucination must have completed its cycle. Her surroundings were increasing insubstantial, and she could feel her body gradually reasserting itself. The sensation was one of rising, going up through the darkness to the light. She was pleased that she wasn’t going to be imprisoned, disembodied, in a sagging, orange plastic sac, but the experience reminded her a little too
much of her and Aimee’s death, and that did a lot to temper her relief. This time she was confronted with a new set of illusions, hallucinations, call them what she might. The first arrived in the twilight zone of her ascent. He was a tall, impossibly angular, and scarcely human figure in what looked like a cross between black undertaker’s weeds and white tie and tails. The outfit was completed by a tall stovepipe hat, and the face under that hat was nothing more than a naked skull with glowing coal-ruby eyes. When this bizarre figure moved, it generated flashes of blue electricity. Semple knew she should have been afraid, but somehow she wasn’t—even when the deaths-head face peered into hers so close that she could smell the neglected freezer reek of his breath, and hissed. “Where is Jim Morrison?”
The question made no sense to Semple. “I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”
“I am Dr. Hypodermic and I am looking for Jim Morrison.”
“I just told you, I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”
The naked skull laughed. “You will, my dear, you will.” And with that, it faded away. Body first, then face, ruby eyes remaining long after the rest of it had gone.
She rose on her own for a while longer, until she thought she spotted another figure; but this one remained in the shadows, showing no desire to approach her. For an instant she thought it might be the hooded form of Anubis’s Dream Warden, but she couldn’t be sure. If it was, could he be the author of whatever was happening to her? She had no time to think about it, though. Now angry, nasal, trailer-trash voices were shouting in the gathering nothingness, as though from a great distance, and the things they were saying did not bode well for whatever was next to come.
“Behold the naked harlot.”