Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  In the moment the visual revelation came, Jim also heard distant music drifting like smoke across the water. Male-voice Wagnerian singing, unaccompanied but pitched to Nordic perfection in a minor key, robust but at the same time mournful. He had to wait a while longer as it drifted closer to see the source of the light and the singing. A Viking longship with dragon prow, most of its deck consumed by flames, floated silently past, followed by a second boat with a black sail and a crew of dark warriors who, with swords uplifted, sang the lament.

  Jim turned to where he imagined Dr. Hypodermic to be standing. “The nine-forty-seven to Valhalla?”

  “You’re beginning to learn, mon frère.”

  Semple was gratified that the very first thing that Gojiro attacked was the same elevated highway the procession had taken on its ceremonial way to the Divine Atom Bomb Festival. His first move was to remove most of the traffic with wide sweeps of his tail. The smaller vehicles went flying with hardly a second glance from the Big Green, but then a Necropolis city omnibus attracted his attention. He picked up the double-decker in both hands and flattened it end to end, like a small boy crushing a cardboard box. He destroyed a couple of large semi trucks the same way, but then the tanks started rolling down the highway toward him. The gold-plated armor of Anubis’s crack elite came in with pennants flying and guns blazing. The peppering the tanks gave him with their cannons and heavy machine guns did Gojiro no actual bodily harm, but nonetheless irritated him intensely. Rather than deal with them piecemeal and have to tolerate the gadfly pinpricks of their firepower, he seized the two sides of the highway in his flatcar hands and began to pull up the roadbed, ripping it loose from its supporting pillars. He then proceeded to roll it up, like a crusty old carpet so reinforced with filth and chewing gum that it just had to go. The tanks tried to reverse away from him, but Gojiro could roll up highway faster than they could retreat, and they were crushed inside the curl of steel and concrete like the filling in a jelly roll.

  Within the tumor in the monster’s brain, Semple watched the multiple images in awe and wonderment. “How strong is he? Are there no limits to what he can do?”

  Outside the dome, blue and blinding electricity crackled as banks of synapses went into reptilian overdrive. The industrial-strength dinosaur brain-lightning was visible though the fabric of the dome/tumor, which was now translucent. Mr. Thomas looked up at Semple in the eerie flickering light. “Almost no limits on this scale. Especially when his dander’s up. The Big Green has a wicked temper.”

  Semple glanced around anxiously. “Are we safe in here?”

  Jesus laughed and gestured to the images. “A lot safer than in that building.”

  When the roll of highway became an untidy spiral bale more than half his own considerable height, Gojiro appeared to decide that the logistics were too taxing and transferred his rage to punching the tensile integrity out of a twenty-story high-rise. Semple had never imagined that the buildings in Necropolis were particularly well made, but she hardly expected that a couple of right and left jabs to the middle floors were all it required to reduce the structure to a pillar of dust and rubble. From Semple’s point of view, the only unfortunate part of the King of the Monsters’ attack was the considerable number of wretched underclass shacks that were crushed underfoot each time he made a move. Although she had personally not fared well at the hands of the Necropolis poor, she didn’t really believe that they deserved to be trampled by a living mountain. On the other hand, it wasn’t something she was going to waste too much time or regret over. What with all the pollution, oppression, poverty, and cannibalism, for many it was probably a merciful release.

  She also couldn’t quite see why the great lizard was so content to hang around in the suburbs, crushing shacks, rolling up roads, and knocking down modest buildings. “Is there any way to get him to move on to downtown? I want to see him total the palace and the TV studios.”

  Jesus looked at her with one of his hand-rubbingly wolfish smiles. “Impatient for some payback?”

  “Damn right I’m impatient.”

  He looked down at the remote. “Then let’s see what we can do.”

  Jim tilted the pipe to the right, about thirty degrees from the vertical, and the impossibly beautiful Asian woman applied the blue and yellow flame of the small lamp to the ball of purest tar-black Shanghai opium that nestled inside. Jim was beginning to get used to the near-seamless shifts of reality. He had quickly realized that his only safe course was to go where the Mystère took him, accept each new situation on its face value, and not struggle or kick or ask too many damn fool questions. Certainly the current environment was very easy to accept. Hanging chimes sang soft and lazy harmonics in the slight, sweet-scented breeze created by gliding fans. Candles flickered in sevens, tens, and dozens, positioned before dark mirrors and behind the diffusion of parchment screens or the refraction of the cracked leaded glass of hexagonal Tiffany shades that split light into unimagined spectra and cast soft auras of protection over all those safely gathered within.

  Jim drew long and steadily on the ivory pipe and, although the tiny carved dragons didn’t actually move, the eighteen-inch tube all but had a life of its own as the living smoke insinuated the receptors of his brain, formally bowing with mandarin manners and welcoming itself as an old and valued friend before it moved on to enfold him in its perfect velvet detachment and gently lead him beyond the reach of hurt or destiny. When they had first arrived at the Palace of Mirrors, Dr. Hypodermic had told him, “Don’t get too accustomed to this place. It’s only an interlude, a rest stop before the tour continues.” He now saw the reason for the warning.

  The other dragons, however—the ones on the slit silk skirt of the impossibly beautiful Asian woman’s vibrantly tight cheongsam—did move. They came animatedly alive as she replaced the long pipe in its ornate holder and got respectfully to her feet from the opium den version of the Hefner bunny dip that she had assumed while ministering to his needs. “Are you content for now?”

  Jim smiled blissfully, sinking back into the fully reclined seat. Hypodermic had told him not to get too accustomed to the place, but Jim was already wishing for the interlude never to end. “I don’t think it would be possible to be any more content.”

  Like the cabin attendant of some divine airline, the woman moved on to the next passenger—or client? customer? trick? Jim watched the sway of her hips and the exquisite sheen of her perfect legs. He appreciated the small reflections from the garment and the way it stretched taut as she leaned forward to address the intoxicant needs of the racked and inert figure in the recliner across the aisle. He appreciated the contours of her ass in a way that was almost completely lacking in active desire. Such was the relationship between the drug and the sex drive. Even the spurs of the flesh to that which was ultimately pleasurable were blunted to a glorious objectivity. As she held the lamp to the new pipe, the flame triggered a rainbow of hallucinations, equal in their perfection to the wafting curves of the woman’s hypnotic body. The true glory was that Jim didn’t have to do a damn thing about it. All he needed was simply to relax down into the magical wonder of it all, where the dreams were waiting to claim him. With time at least temporarily negated under the opium spell, he didn’t need to worry that Hypodermic would wake him and insist that they continue the tour of the Mystère. He didn’t even have to worry about the fact that the figure in the next recliner looked a great deal like Doc Holliday.

  An inset window came up in the top right corner of the forward screen. Jesus smiled. To Semple’s mind, he was becoming altogether too pleased with himself as the trashing of Necropolis progressed. “I think you’ll like this.”

  Gojiro was now wading knee deep in the city’s business district, wrecking imposing corporate structures left and right. A hapless Zeppelin swung into the King of the Monsters’ field of vision and was instantly incinerated by a burst of blue breath. Its hydrogen exploded like a giant phallic firecracker. Boom! Gojiro trundled on. All around him, pilla
rs of red fire and oily black smoke marked where entire city blocks were burning, ignited by electrical sparks and the gas tanks of recklessly hurled vehicles. Gushers of steam erupted as progressive sections of the computer network blew its boilers. Jesus looked round at Semple and Mr. Thomas “Don’t you just love to see a city on fire, trapped in its own death throes?”

  The great creature’s newest objective appeared to be a squat and singularly ugly double-triangle pyramid festooned with tall steel broadcast antennae and satellite uplink dishes. Semple peered at the screen. “The TV center?”

  Jesus nodded. “Watch the inset.”

  At that moment all the window showed was random, cathode-stream snow, but then the snow cleared and Semple found that, of all the TV shows on all the TV channels in the Afterlife, she was watching Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club. Semple blinked. “How the hell did that get there?”

  “Watch and learn.”

  In black and white so crude and grainy that it was almost an insult to the viewer, and with all the production quality of a snuff movie, the painted and powdered naked women Fat Ari treated as the merchandise paraded down the catwalk, smiling into the camera with painfully phony, frightened allure, and leaning forward so the potential customers on the other end of the process could clearly read the barcodes on their foreheads.

  Mr. Thomas chewed a chunk of plastic packing material and snuffled through his nose. “There but for the grace of someone . . . ”

  Semple looked at the goat in surprise.

  “You know about me and Fat Ari?”

  “Even a goat has his sources.”

  Jesus glanced up from running the remote. “If you’d made it to the catwalk, I certainly would have put in a bid for you.”

  “Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”

  Jesus shrugged. “I would have thought so.”

  Mr. Thomas looked around for something else to eat. “Of course, you didn’t have a barcode . . . ”

  “How the hell do you guys know all this?”

  Jesus looked down at the remote as though he suddenly had something very important to do, and Mr. Thomas simply avoided her eyes. Semple, oblivious for the moment to what Gojiro might be doing outside, planted her superhero gauntlets on her hips and looked disgustedly at Jesus and the goat. “Are you telling me that you two used to sit up here and watch Necropolis TV for fun?”

  Mr. Thomas nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “It can be one of the more entertaining channels for the warped of taste.”

  “And did you buy any slaves?”

  Mr. Thomas nodded at Jesus. “He tried it a couple of times.”

  “And where are they now?”

  “Unfortunately there was a bit of a screwup with the animation process when they entered the Big Green’s brain.”

  Semple shook her head. “I can hardly believe you even watched this crap, let alone actually tried to buy people.”

  Jesus finally contributed to the discussion by gesturing to the screen. “I somehow don’t think we’ll be doing it anymore.”

  In the inset window, one of the slaves had looked up at the roof of the studio and started screaming in tight close-up. On the larger screen, Gojiro was ripping loose one of the triangular sides of the TV center. Suddenly, his forward vision was peering down into the studio where Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club was going out live. As slaves and technicians alike scattered for their lives, a huge green hand entered the black and white picture and ripped up the catwalk. A lone cameraman was sticking it out to the end, more concerned with preserving potentially historic images than his own continued continuity. Apart from the cameraman, the only individual who had stood his ground was Fat Ari himself. In fact, he actually advanced on the King of the Monsters as though completely unaware that the thing he faced was many thousands of times his own size. He stomped down the stairs from the control room, his irate tented bulk quivering with the same fury that Semple had faced when he discovered her lack of barcode.

  “Do you know what you’re doing to me, you fucking mutant iguana?”

  Gojiro stopped and Gojiro blinked, and then Gojiro lifted a mighty foot and brought it down with Richter-scale force, crushing Fat Ari, the intrepid camera operator, the rest of the set for Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club, and anyone else who might have remained in the vicinity. For an instant, Semple felt a twinge. Fat Ari was advanced cannibal pimp scum and definitely deserved to be flattened, but at least he had departed with class. Then she steeled her attitude.

  “One down and some more to go.” She looked down at Jesus. “On to the palace?”

  Jesus nodded, seemingly aware that Semple had taken charge, but having no immediate quarrel with the situation. “That won’t be a problem.”

  Jim had entered an opium dream of unmatched extravagance, extravagance on a par with those visions of paradise Hasan-e Sābbah, the Old Man of Mountains, had offered his razor boy and blade maiden hashasheens to keep them killing and putting the fear of Allah and Hasan into the politicians of the twelfth century. Jim’s vision was a dark and smoky mirror viewed through drapes of burnished golden chiffon, which was probably in keeping with his character and disposition and with the fact that, as far as he knew, he was still somewhere in the loose confines of Hell. The vision was also colored by its origins with Dr. Hypodermic, for Hypodermic was not the kind of furnish marble pools, fleecy skies, and pliant handmaidens in any Morrison illusion of perfection. Hypodermic would never bring Jim to any Beverly Hills consumer lotus land of white-boy vices and Wonderbread sins. If Jim had indeed achieved his Xanadu, it would have to be a stately pleasure dome of night and mysterious mist, as far, far down in Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man as it was possible to go. It would hug the crags and surf and romantic chasms of ice and fire, where Alph the sacred river seethed at the apex of its ceaseless turmoil and crashed into the kraken depths of the great and sunless inward sea.

  His Xanadu was a savage place and holy, both brutal and enchanted. A beast within a city, rampaging at its heart. Above the ring of Fenders and dulcimers, Bechtstein grand music loud and long, and the crash of dancing timpani and rocks, the voices of women soared as they wailed for their doomed and demon lovers amid a perfect chaos and a tranquillity of disorder that even Jim himself had never been quite able to visualize. The stillness of his dope-fiend vision was the peace in the ultimate eye of the hurricane. Why had he never thought of that before, made it his objective? The magic of the pipe had brought it all into such clear focus and sharp perspective. Previously he had only closed his eyes in holy dread and ridden upon the storm with his cold silver-ringed fingers locked into the mane of the nightmare. Around him, all was a spiral of magnificent fury. Fountains gushed scarlet flame and reptiles slithered about their business of corruption and seduction, but at the center of it all, he had finally found the strength and stability of the truly and fantastically free, free to waste an infinity of time if he so desired. Free to regard his right foot for a millennium if he so desired. To reinforce this bold discovery, his own face came toward him, with a woman, the woman, dark curls and pale, ready to reveal, repeating that it was true, it was all true, voice muffled but becoming clear, through the mirage of the ion-charged mist of Avalon, and no one cried, “Beware! Beware!” at his flashing eyes and floating hair or wove a circle around him thrice because he on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of—

  “Okay. Enough, mon ami. You’re slipping into borrowed poetry. Time to wake and move.”

  And Xanadu was gone and Jim was out of the dream and into a place of ice and freezing cold. “Fuck you, Hypodermic! I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

  Semple had never seen the exterior of the palace before. Always before she had been on the inside scheming to get out; now she was on the outside scheming to destroy. From above, from the perspective of Gojiro looking down, the layout was that of an ankh enclosed within a pentagram, with tall steel and glass obelisks positioned at each of the intersecting points of the five-pointed star, and an
ornamental reflecting lake in the upper teardrop of the ankh. In the design of the sweeping ground plan, Anubis had made sure his architect-priests had covered every symbolic base, but Semple knew it was going to take a great deal more than symbolism, no matter how perfectly crafted, to save the dog-god from reptile apocalypse.

  Already the streets around the palace and even the palace gardens themselves were thronged with people fleeing the advancing monster. From the height of Gojiro, they formed ant-scurry patterns in and around the fake Egyptian, building-block structures. Then shots from nearer the ground started coming in on the auxiliary screens. (Again Semple wondered how the hell this was achieved.) The single-minded fear in the faces said it all. No heroics or civilized niceties like women or children first. Just run like hell and the devil take those who faltered. It was every man for himself. In a classic low-budget horror movie panic, children and senior citizens were trampled underfoot. Jesus laughed uproariously as a fat woman dropped the jewel box she’d been hugging to her ample breast. She hesitated, tempted to stoop to retrieve scattered gold and baubles. A man slammed into her and she staggered. Her black Cleopatra wig flew off. The jewelry might have been debatable, but the wig was nonnegotiable. She bent to grab for it, four more people cannoned into her, and she went down in the stampede. In the moment that the wig went flying, a pig-pink shaved head was revealed and Semple wondered if the woman and the guard who had given her barcode problems back in the city jail could be one and the same. It seemed too much of a long-shot coincidence, unless, by some strange and unknown process, the close-ups were somehow being geared to her personal payback.

  At that point, whoever or whatever was directing the live coverage of Gojiro against Necropolis grew tired of close-ups of the human panic and switched back to the monster onslaught against the local real estate. As Gojiro snapped off the first obelisk he encountered and, using what was left of it as a makeshift mace, began reducing a considerable portion of the palace to random debris, the God-King’s air force decided to mount a last-ditch kamikaze defense. After the attack of the Flying Wing and the revelation that Gojiro was quite capable of swallowing a small nuclear device with no detrimental effects beyond a little flatulence and irritability, Semple would have given up and used all her remaining aircraft to get as far away from the Big Green as possible. She was well aware, though, that Anubis’s thought processes were very different from her own, and she could well imagine the dogheaded boy holed up in some deep palace bunker screaming for final death-or-glory stands by whatever was left of his armed forces. When the ill-assorted squadron came in low over the ankh in the pentagram, she was hardly surprised, and equally unmoved, as Gojiro, starting with the P51 Mustang that was leading the attack, used the obelisk to bat them out of the sky with all the ease and unconcern of a major leaguer playing amateurs. The last stand failed to so much as lay a suicidal glove on him.