by Mick Farren
Once away from the water and the immediate vicinity of boats and piers, the majority of the two-way traffic was centered on a bank of descending escalators fashioned from copper, steel, and dark bronze that seemed to plunge to infinity, flanked by two huge carved angels of death with wings that extended to form the roof of the shaft. As far as Jim could see, these moving staircases were the only way in and out of the cavernous docking area. Jim assumed this was where Doc was heading, and so was surprised when Holliday veered off, going in the direction of a stone colonnade over to their left that housed a number of booths doing a brisk business, if the lines forming in front of them were any indication.
“First thing we have to do is get in line and sell our souls.”
Jim blinked. “Sell our souls? Who in Hell would want to buy our souls?”
Doc shrugged as though it were the most natural thing in the underworld. “It’s the way it works in this Hell. You make your mark and supposedly sell your soul and then they load you up with a bag of the local currency to spend on drink or drugs or women, or gamble away at the tables, or generally dispose of on whatever might be to your own particular taste and downfall.”
Jim’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “That’s all there is to it?”
“Soul-selling is the foundation of the local economy. You got to admit it’s no weirder than a lot of other monetary systems. Ask John Maynard Keynes.”
Jim made a “whatever” gesture and followed Doc to the nearest of the lines. “Still, there’s a slightly ominous ring to selling one’s soul.”
Doc looked back at Jim, starting to lose patience gain. “Shit, Morrison, will you once and for all put ‘ominous’ out of your vocabulary? You’re in Hell, sport. What else can they do to you? Send you to Peoria?”
When their turn finally came, a clerk in pince-nez, business suit, bow tie, and high starched collar, straight out of the counting rooms of Kafka’s castle, stood in the teller’s cage of a Victorian banking house, ready to supervise the transaction. He pushed two moist clay tablets, covered in sparrow-scratched cuneiform, in front of the two men. “Make your mark, we’ll bake them later.”
Jim look doubtfully at the wet surface of the clay. “Shouldn’t we read these things before we sign them? I’ve signed a lot of dumb contracts in my time and regretted it later.”
The clerk sniffed and looked at Jim over his half lenses. “You read ancient Sumerian, I suppose?”
“No.”
“So?”
Jim sighed, reached for the stylus, and made his mark. Once the mark was committed, the clerk hefted two large leather bags onto the counter and pushed one to Jim and the other to Doc. “Move along now, there’s others waiting.”
As soon as they were away from the clerk’s booth, Jim opened his bag and peered inside. At first it seemed as though the pouch were filled with large gold coins, like Mexican double eagles or Spanish doubloons. The moment Jim reached in to pull one out, though, he knew different. The coin was merely gold plastic. “We’ve been had. It’s just plastic.”
Doc wasn’t in the least worried. “They work just as well.”
“Hell ran out of gold?”
“Gold got too damned heavy to tote around.”
Jim had to admit there was a certain practicality to the idea. “I guess that makes sense.”
Doc was scanning the crowd. “The first thing we need is a Virgil.”
“A Virgil?”
“It was the poet Virgil who led Dante Alighieri through the levels and circles of Hell.”
Jim scowled. “Even I knew that.”
“So these days, now that torture has apparently given way to tourism, the tour guides all pretend they’re Virgil.”
Doc indicated a group of old men in soft gray robes waiting, scanning the faces of the crowd moving to the up escalators. “Virgils.”
“Why do we need a guide? I though you knew your way around Hell.”
Doc shook his head. “These days, Hell has a nasty habit of shifting its geography when you’re least expecting it. The Virgils are among the few who can keep track of all the twists and inversions, and certainly the only ones plying for hire. Indeed, it’s how they make their humble nut in the underworld. It’s good to have one, at least until you get to the general area where you want to be.”
“So folks work for a living in Hell?”
Doc laughed. “Did you imagine Hell would be anything but a sink of terminal capitalism and wage slavery?”
As he spoke, he beckoned to one of the old men. “Ho, Virgil, attend us if you’d be so kind.”
The Virgil bowed and hurried toward them. Doc fished in his pouch and pulled out two of the plastic coins. He formally returned the Virgil’s bow and held out the coins. “Onorate l’altissimo poeta. Honor the greatest poet.”
The Virgil took the coins and pocketed them. “The poet accepts the honor and will lead you where you may.”
Doc nodded. “Then, like Orpheus, shall we start by descending?”
They were about to move to the head of the escalators when a commotion near the water caused them to pause. A craft, seemingly unusual for even the entrance to Hell, had appeared in the boat basin and the crowd on the wharves was pressing forward to gawk. A massive baroque submarine had surfaced, right beside the Mississippi paddle boat. The black iron monster had a definitely nineteenth century air about it, despite the fact that, in the nineteenth century, submarines were little more than a fantasy. Its cast Birmingham platework was decorated to the extreme, sporting fanciful scallops, rolling cornices, bas relief dolphins, and Neptune with his trident as a figurehead. A line of steel spikes along its dorsal ridge were also ornate, but looked as if they could rip the bottom out of most surface craft. Jim quickly glanced at Doc. “Could this be our benefactor from the river by Gehenna?”
“I fear it might be.”
“You fear?”
Doc nodded. “That’s what I said.”
Jim studied the craft. “It looks like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.”
Doc shook his head. “That’s not Nemo.”
As Doc spoke, a hatch in the conning tower opened and no less than the Voodoo Mystère Guede Docteur Piqures—Dr. Hypodermic himself—climbed out with the angular movements of a spider in evening dress. Doc took Jim and the Virgil urgently by the arm. “I think it would be a very good idea if we got out of here as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible.”
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Semple had been certain that the Beast, the one the whole damn tribe was screaming about, was at least going to be the Great Beast of Revelations, the mighty usher of the End Times, with the traditional seven heads, each with ten horns, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion, as biblically advertised. Instead, the massive figure that loomed over the horizon was something out of a whole other cultural ethos. How in creation had the great green, mountain-sized superstar and post-atomic Japanese monster movie icon found his way to this place of barren biblical hokum? Perhaps it was merely that, when you’re green and the size of a mountain, you can pretty much go where you want. Maybe the phrase “post-atomic” should have given Semple something of a clue, but right at that moment the analytical part of Semple’s mind was in temporary shutdown and she stood, mouth open with an expression the British describe as gobsmacked.
“Godz . . . !”
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
The ground shook repeatedly as the King of the Monsters advanced ponderously toward the faux Children of Israel. At first, it had only been possible to see his head and shoulders above the line of the horizon, but the rest of him came rapidly into sight, his potbelly, foundation legs, and finally his mighty four-toed feet, each of the latter kicking a dust storm with every impacted step, but nothing in comparison with the billowing clouds raised by the angry sweeps of his impossibly massive tail.
“Boy, do you look mad.”
Semple didn’t figure how or why, but somehow she knew instinctively, by some third, fourth, or even fif
th sight, that to utter the King of the Monsters’ name in English could not only cause him extreme and maybe litigious vexation, but also create other malevolent resonances all over the Afterlife. That was why she had cut off her instinctive utterance in midsyllable. He looked angry enough already, with his eyes burning red and his feathery dorsal wattles erect and quivering. Semple quickly racked her brains for the acceptable Japanese nomenclature. Gojiro?
Wasn’t that what they called him?
The Tribe of Moses weren’t worrying what the advancing monster was called. They seemed to know that he was bad news by any name and immediately scattered in every direction, running for their lives. Men ran and women ran, sheep and goats stampeded, and camels made themselves scarce at a galloping thirty to forty knots. Only Semple remained where she was. Although Semple was far from sure if she was simply stunned or other more perverse forces were at work, her refusal to move made about as much sense as everyone else’s flight. It is virtually impossible for a human, or even a camel, fleet-footed from fear, to outrun a being with a stride of five hundred yards. As if to demonstrate the point, within another three stomping paces one great foot had crashed down, flattening some twenty of the faithful and a few dozen livestock. A second seismic stomp crushed twice as many humans as well as assorted sheep and goats. Leaning slightly forward, the mighty Gojiro now brought his tail into play and, with a resounding slap, sent a good twenty percent of Moses’ remaining followers wind-winging their involuntary way to the Great Double Helix.
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Semple had lost sight of Moses shortly after Gojiro had first appeared, and when she looked around she could see no sign of him. She was a little surprised that he had run with the rest. She imagined that he would have at least made a brief attempt to stand his ground and vibe down the living green mountain. The Patriarch had proved a chickenshit. This strip of stinking desert might be a tract of low-rent wilderness, but after all it was his very own self-created turf, wasn’t it? Unless, of course, she had been wrong all the way down the line. Now that she thought about it, she’d only been assuming. He’d never actually said how and why he and his people were there. For all she knew, Moses and his mob might be interlopers on the bad end of a netherworld reconstruct of Monster Island. As to why she was standing her own ground, Semple couldn’t quite say. She had no territorial imperative, and she certainly had no intention of vibing Gojiro down. Later, thinking back over her behavior, she could only remember a firm but irrational certainty that the megasaur intended her no harm.
Even in hindsight, this idea was hardly backed by the evidence. Gojiro clearly intended absolute harm to every human in the vicinity, and was bent on quite literally stamping them out. Even as Semple attempted to understand her lack of action, he was, to this very end, performing a quick flatfooted dance, a four-four combination with a hop-skip at the end and a whack with the tail on the off beat, and that was all anyone wrote for half of Moses’ followers. The accompanying earth tremors were Richter-scale-worthy. As the survivors became more widely scattered, Gojiro changed his tactics. He stopped dancing and began taking long, deliberate, hopscotch strides, like a child methodically killing a colony of ants. Every few steps he would pause to mop up small groups that had managed to elude his feet with a burst of incandescent electric-blue breath. Again Semple wondered what Moses and his crew could have done to so anger the King of the Monsters. If his movies were to be believed, he was rarely so vindictive with anything but high-tension power cables and Tokyo subway trains.
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Except for a handful of the fleetest of foot, most of Moses’ tribe were now history. For all practical purposes, Semple stood alone. Gojiro had his back to her, busily uprooting a small clump of date palms in which one of the largest group of survivors had fruitlessly attempted to conceal itself. She seemed to be the only one in whom the Monster King had no apparent interest; could it be that some new reality distortion had come into being and he actually couldn’t see her? A swift blast of nuclear halitosis dispatched the last of the desperate fugitives among the ripped-up palms, and then Gojiro started to turn. He stared directly at where Semple was standing, and one look at the glint in his enormous red eyes collapsed her invisibility theory once and for all.
For almost ten seconds, the giant reptile did nothing but stand absolutely still and frown thoughtfully at her, furrowing his great scaly brow. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something and began to move toward her—but now his movements were completely different. He lumbered forward with all the care that something of his size could muster. He seemed to be taking great pains to not shake the earth or spook her in any other way. Not that he was very successful. As he came closer, the ground beneath her feet still bounced and vibrated so thoroughly that she was forced to spread her feet in a surfing pose to remain standing. At first it seemed as though the great reptile were going to reach down and scoop her up in one of its massive hands, like Fay Wray or Jessica Lange, depending on which version of King Kong one favored. Proportionally, Gojiro’s hands were rather dainty, particularly when compared to his behemoth feet, but each was still the size of a railroad flatcar, and the idea of being scooped into one of them held little or no appeal.
Gojiro leaned forward, but neither of his hands moved in her direction. Instead he just bent forward so his huge head was only twenty feet from the ground, close enough for her to smell the ozone tang of his lizard breath and hear the deep rumblings of his bodily functions. As his face came toward her, the monster snuffled slightly. Even his slight exhalation was more than enough to send a small dust cloud spiraling at Semple, forcing her to shield her eyes with her hands. “Holy shit, pal! Watch it, will you? You almost blinded me.”
Gojiro straightened up slightly and took a half step back. Although it was hard to read his expression, Semple could have sworn he looked regretful, even apologetic. The motion, however, was almost enough to send her stumbling. This time, though, she didn’t complain. The King of the Monsters seemed to be intrigued with her; he had neither stomped her to pulp nor vaporized her with his Roentgen breath, and she deemed it unwise to place any undue stress on her apparent good fortune. She contented herself with merely muttering under her breath, “Anubis and Moses were one thing, big boy, but if you expect me to fuck you, you’d better forget it.”
The monster lowered his head farther, peering closely at her. He closed one eye for a better look as though he had trouble focusing at what, for him, was such a short distance. Even a giant reptile looking at her in this way made Semple feel uncomfortably on display and she reflexively smoothed the folds of her rough caftan. “If I’d known you were going to stop by, I would have thrown on something a bit more presentable. Unfortunately, you find me somewhat lacking a wardrobe.”
The great red eye came closer. It had a vertical iris like the eye of a bird, and in it she could see her own distorted reflection. “I have to tell you, in some cultures, staring like that is considered highly ill-mannered. You’re Japanese. You ought to know about that kind of thing.”
No sooner had she spoken, however, than something bizarre began to happen to Semple. It felt as thought her essential soul-force were being drawn out of her body and pulled toward the huge red eye. Semple swallowed hard. “Oh my God, now what?”
Jim, Doc, and their hired Virgil rode down the endless escalator. Their final glimpse of the boat basin had been of Dr. Hypodermic stepping down from the hull of his submarine and walking across the surface of the water, leaving wisps of steam and blue crackles of energy while the crowds on the piers and jetties fearfully backed off to give him plenty of space. The Virgil noticed the way that both men had stared nervously at the black figure in the stovepipe hat and he’d looked at them with deferential curiosity. “You have a problem with the renowned Doctor H?”
Jim glanced sharply at the Virgil. “You know him?”
The Virgil made a slight bow. “Everyone in Hell knows Doctor H, but I’m glad
to say that I’ve had no personal contact or involvement with him. I do know, though, that if he wants to find you, he will. And if that’s the case, although I’ve contracted to be your guide, I will immediately flee if Hypodermic so much as approaches either of you.”
Doc nodded. “I understand the limits of your loyalty, altissimo poeta.”
“You are a man of infinite grace and subtlety, Doc Holliday.”
“Thank you, altissimo poeta.”
Jim looked sideways at Doc. “Is it more likely to be you or me that Hypodermic seems to be shadowing?”
Doc looked hard at Jim. “I don’t know, my friend. What’s your best impression?”
“You seemed to be on pretty good terms with him back at that town of yours with the cantina and the opium den.”
“On good terms? With him? I never did hear of anyone exactly being on good terms with Dr. Hypodermic.”
“You went into the cantina without too much hesitation and talked to all three of them. I was the one that had to leave town.”
“All three of them?”
“All three of them. The awesome trio, the three voodoo Mystères—Queen Danbhalah La Flambeau, Baron Tonnerre, and Dr. Hypodermic.”
The Virgil glanced uncomfortably at Jim and then turned to Doc. “Your young friend tosses these names around unwisely.”
Doc sighed. “Indeed he does, altissimo poeta, indeed he does. He’s one of those devil-may-care junko partners who won’t be told. You probably know the kind. If he wasn’t also paranoid, and occasionally halfway resourceful, he would have found himself consigned to some unimaginable place a long time ago.” He turned back to Jim. “It’s unfortunate that I have no recollection of this alleged meeting with the Mystères.”
“That’s not to say it didn’t happen or that it isn’t going to happen.”