by Mick Farren
When Semple had returned to her sanctuary with Mr. Thomas, her first objective had been gratefully to strip off the absurd comic book costume and take a lengthy shower to wash away the accumulated depravity of the outside world. While she accomplished this, she left Mr. Thomas to his own devices in a luxury suite of rooms that had been designed to generate an atmosphere of opulent Renaissance splendor. When she returned, dressed in a robe originally designed by Gianni Versace for Lucrezia Borgia, she moved in full lady-of-the-manor mode. With a drink in her hand, she gratefully sank to a soft reclining couch littered with silk and velvet cushions. “Do you know how good it is to simply relax? I believe I’ve had an overdose of deserts, dinosaurs, and dogheaded gods.”
Unfortunately, this period of relaxation proved only the briefest respite. No sooner had she and the goat settled down to an idleness of alcohol and small talk than alarms went off all over her domain and the noisy footfalls of leather guards slapped down the corridors. The doors of the renaissance suite burst open, and four of the rubber guards hurried inside, weapons at the ready. The leader of the quartet bowed to Semple and addressed her with wheezing breathlessness. “We have detected the approach of an unannounced and unauthorized intruder, my lady.”
Semple seemed doomed to live in interesting times. Both she and Mr. Thomas got to their feet, looking around nervously. “Where exactly is this intruder supposed to arrive?”
“Right here in these rooms, my lady.”
Now Semple was really nervous. She had made a number of enemies in her recent travels, and although she hadn’t thought of it before, she supposed there was always the possibility that one or more of them might have followed her there. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the Dream Warden die on the rooftop in Necropolis. She urgently gave her orders to the guards. “Be ready to shoot on sight.”
The four rubber guards nodded, stiffened, and raised their blasters.
“If some son of a bitch has come here to make trouble, he’ll be blasted to Limbo. I’m really not in the mood for this.”
No sooner were the words out Semple’s mouth than a shimmer appeared in the exact center of the room. Quickly a materializing figure formed inside the shimmer. It was only when the shape stabilized that Semple recognized it and shouted to the guards, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! It’s Aimee, goddamn it!”
The shimmer faded and Aimee stood in the middle of the room, worried and distraught. Despite her obvious distress, Semple instantly vented all of her shock and surprise on her sister. “Why the fuck couldn’t you call first? You never come here unannounced.”
“I never come here at all.”
“All the more reason to call. My guards almost burned you down.”
“I didn’t want the nuns to know where I was going.”
Mr. Thomas lapped his gin again now that the danger had passed. “You’re having trouble with your nuns?”
Aimee glared at the goat as though he had no place to be asking her questions. Semple angrily intercepted the look. “Don’t treat Mr. Thomas like that. He’s a good friend.”
“But he came with him, with that . . . that . . . ” Aimee was at a loss for a suitably apt description.
Semple filled in for her. “Jesus?”
“He isn’t the real Christ.”
“We knew he wasn’t the genuine article. I told you that up front.”
“But you didn’t tell me what he really was.”
“What do you mean, what he really was?”
“Women have started vanishing.”
“Vanishing?”
“First it was three of the dancers on the headland. I didn’t really miss them, but now some of my nuns have disappeared . . . ”
Aimee was talking as though Jesus had already been in her Heaven for a number of days, but Semple didn’t comment on this. She was accustomed to time passing at different rates in the two neighboring environments. It always evened itself out in the end. “I don’t actually see what the problem is. So you’ve mislaid some nuns and dancing girls? Surely you can replace them.”
“That’s not the point.”
“So what is the point?”
“I think your phony Jesus has something to do with it.”
“I thought you and him were getting on like a house on fire.”
Aimee looked a little shamefaced, enough to make Semple wonder just how much of the house had been on fire. “We were getting along very well, but I couldn’t be with him every hour of the day. There were lengths of time that couldn’t be accounted for.”
“And you think he was creeping around disappearing your women?”
“That’s what the nuns think and they’re blaming me for it.”
While the two women had been talking, Mr. Thomas had started edging toward the door. Semple noticed this out of the corner of her eye and snapped at him, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
The goat did his best to present a picture of innocence. “I thought I’d go and talk to Igor. You two obviously have family business to discuss.”
“You stay exactly where you are. Don’t so much as move a hoof or I’ll turn my guards loose on you.”
Mr. Thomas looked decidedly unhappy. “I don’t see what use I can be.”
“You lived with him for fuck knows how long, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but . . . ”
“But what?”
“I mean, this is the Afterlife, isn’t it? What does it matter if he’s a serial . . . ”
Both Aimee and Semple were stunned. “He’s a serial killer?”
The goat was defensive. “Yes, but I mean, they don’t actually die, do they? They either go back to the pods, or else it hardly matters because you can just make another one. It’s really very minor compared to what happens in some places.”
Aimee could hardly believe what she was hearing, and Semple had to remind herself what a sheltered life her sibling lived. “That’s not the point. The nuns don’t like it, and if I don’t do something about him, I’m going to have a full-scale mutiny on my hands.”
Semple peered curiously at Mr. Thomas. “How long have you known he had these kinds of . . . tastes?”
Mr. Thomas hung his head. “I guess I always suspected. Some of the things he said and the porno he liked to watch. It wasn’t until the problems with the girls from Fat Ari that I knew for sure.”
“The girls from Fat Ari weren’t lost in transit?”
Mr. Thomas shamefully shook his head. “The truth became a little twisted in the telling.”
“So why the hell didn’t you warm me later, when you knew we were coming here?”
Now the goat felt that he was on firmer ground. “It wasn’t my place to drop a dime on him. And besides, we were boxed in. We had to get out of the Big Green’s brain.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
“I am your friend. I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t know you had a problem with serial . . . ”
Aimee butted in. “Why don’t you use the word ‘murderer’? That’s what he is, isn’t it? A damned murderer?”
Semple ignored Aimee’s outburst and thought carefully. So Jesus had turned out to be a highly unpleasant kind of pervert. If all things were equal, she really ought to leave her sister to deal with it as best she could. In the Nietzschean long run, solving the problem herself would only serve to make Aimee stronger. Unfortunately, things were never that equal; blood was blood and genes were genes, and Semple simply couldn’t just leave her only sister at the mercy of rebel nuns and a phony run-amok Jesus Christ. The question also remained unresolved as to what might happen to the other sibling if one went to the pods. “We’re going to have to sort this fool out, aren’t we?”
Aimee nodded. “We are.”
Semple sighed. The cliché “No peace for the wicked” seemed to be working overtime. “Let me put on something more suitable, and we’ll be on our way. Do you think I should bring some of my guards?”
Aimee frowned.
“That seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?”
Mr. Thomas now felt it was safe to make a helpful interjection. “Do the nuns have access to weapons?”
Aimee looked at him as if he were crazy. “What would nuns want with weapons?”
“You never can tell with nuns.”
Aimee was shaking her head. “Armed nuns? That’s absurd.”
Mr. Thomas nodded. “I’m glad it’s not my problem.”
Semple turned angrily on him. “Who says it’s not your problem?”
“You can’t hold me responsible for what that idiot Jesus gets up to.”
“I hold you responsible enough to take you with us.”
Mr. Thomas sighed. “Me? You’re taking me back to that ridiculous trailer-park Heaven?”
“That’s right, you.”
Jim took another drink. This time nothing happened. He turned back to Hypodermic. “Just what the fuck is with you? Why fucking pick on me? Or is it a thing you gods have, that you just like to mindfuck humans?”
“I suppose you think it makes us feel superior?”
“The idea did cross my mind.”
“Believe me, we don’t have to make any moves to feel superior. You humans can do it all by yourselves. Your kind can really surpass any species or culture in the field of aberrant self-destructive stupidity.”
Jim was growing very tired of the Doctor and his attitude. Only the knowledge of how the Mystère was able to hurt him stopped him from coming right out and saying so. “So what have we come back here for? Are you planning to give me back to the aliens?”
“I don’t believe the aliens want you.”
This finally pushed Jim over the line. He was on his feet facing Hypodermic, who sat, bent-legged, arms impossibly folded, with his back to a Crossroads sign written in a script that Jim didn’t recognize. Every so often, a blue spark would jump from his body. “What the fuck is your problem? I mean, okay, so I was a dope fiend at the end of my life on Earth, and according to you that makes my ass somehow belong to you. So you take me on this totally pointless trek from hallucination to hallucination, and I get hurt, then I get high, then I get frozen and scared and dumped down in Vietnam for five minutes, and at no point do you bother to explain to me what the fuck the purpose of all this is, except maybe to convince me that you’re a hundred times better than me, and all the time I’m wondering what the hell is in any of this for either of us? I mean, I hope you’re getting your kicks from all this, because I’m sure as hell not. All I know is that I’m back at the fucking Crossroads, and as far as I’m concerned, this is where I came in.”
“Have you quite finished?”
Jim shook his head. “No, but it’ll do for now.”
“You know that I could send you back to the Great Double Helix or even to Limbo?”
“Yeah, of course I know that. But you probably will anyway.”
“You’re getting exceedingly brave for a human.”
“You ever hear the expression ‘Thus far and no further’?”
“And if I said further and you said no?”
Jim glanced up as another triangular formation of UFOs crossed the sky. “I know as well as you do that there’s nothing I can do about it.” He looked back, directly into Hypodermic’s red glowing eyes. “But that’s what I’m asking you, isn’t it? Why the fuck should you want to make me go further? What percentage is there in it for either of us? The only thing you prove is that you can make a drunk and an ex-junkie do what you want. There’s no big trick in that.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you had a destiny?”
Jim’s expression became wary and suspicious. “No, not recently.”
“Maybe that’s something you should ponder on.”
“What are you trying to tell me? That you’re preparing me for some kind of destiny?”
“You wouldn’t believe that?”
“It’d be hard.”
“Some things we keep secret even from ourselves.”
Jim wasn’t letting Hypodermic get away with that piece of obliqueness. “Wait one minute . . . ” But then he was distracted by a sudden shimmer of light some fifty yards down the road. “Now what the hell is that?”
Hypodermic lazily looked around. “Probably one more fool wanting to sell his soul so he can play the damned guitar like Keith Richards. He’s hoping to find Legba, le Maître Ka-Fu, the Master of the Crossroads, but tonight he’s only going to find disappointment.”
But the figure appearing out of the spinning shimmer was not carrying a guitar. Nothing so mundane. She was nine feet tall, not including her massive headdress of spun gold and ostrich plumes, and she wore a floor-length robe tailored from sheets of frozen flame. Danbhala La Flambeau had arrived at the Crossroads, and now Jim had two Mystères to contend with instead of just one.
“Ça va, le bon Docteur Piqures?”
Dr. Hypodermic didn’t exactly seem pleased to see his statuesque female counterpart. “We’re talking English here.”
La Flambeau drifted toward them. Her feet didn’t touch the surface of the road. “Are you still torturing that poor boy, Hypodermic?”
“The more I try to reason with him, the more recalcitrant he does become.”
Jim glared at the Doctor. “When did you try reasoning with me, you son of a bitch?”
Hypodermic appealed to La Flambeau. “You see what I mean? Now he calls me a son of a bitch.”
“And what did you expect? The boy had to develop a backbone sooner or later.”
If Jim had been angry before, now he was furious. “Are you telling me this has been no more than some kind of bullshit boot-camp character-building exercise?”
La Flambeau smiled knowingly. “You didn’t really expect to drift through the entire Afterlife getting worthless drunk and telling everyone how you lost your memory and didn’t know which side was up, did you?”
Jim, having already faced Hypodermic, saw no reason to back down to La Flambeau, even though she did seem as formidable and direct as the Doctor was sinister and devious. “But I did lose my memory. There’s still a fuck of a lot of it missing.”
“But you didn’t lose your anger and your passion, did you?”
“I assumed a lot of that stuff was left behind on Earth.”
Now Hypodermic started in on him again. Two against one at the Crossroads. “That’s mainly because you died like a wretched defeated hophead.”
Jim didn’t like the odds at all and he reacted without thinking. “And whose fault was that?”
Both La Flambeau and Hypodermic looked at him sharply. “Yes, whose fault was that?”
Jim realized what he’d said, and all he could do was shrug. “Yeah, I guess I’m the only one who can take the bottom-line rap for that.”
La Flambeau nodded. “That, at least, is progress.”
“Progress toward what?”
“Progress to the kind of attitude you are going to need when you get where you’re going.”
“Where I’m going? There’s some kind of destination to all this?”
“Oh, indeed there is, Jim Morrison.”
Jim had fallen into these kinds of traps before. This new line of the Mystères’ was starting to sound like a close neighbor of Doc Holliday’s doctrine of wait and see. “And is anyone going to tell me what it might be? Or do I have to go on twisting in the wind?”
La Flambeau looked at Hypodermic. “Shall I tell him or will you?”
Hypodermic’s jaw clicked. “You tell him. I’ve spent enough time with him not to want to give him the satisfaction.”
La Flambeau smiled at Jim. “The Doctor is famous for his charm both in this world and the last.”
Jim nodded. “I’ve already observed.”
“It’s time for you to move on, Jim Morrison, and learn some new lessons. It’s time for you to visit the Island of the Gods.”
Jim took a step back. “Wait a minute—”
“There’s no time left to wait.”
“I thought time was
strictly relative.”
“That doesn’t mean we have it to waste.”
“I’ve always tried to steer clear of the gods.”
“We do tend to limit the choices of humans.”
“I’ve heard things can happen to men who get too close to gods.”
“Things worse even than death?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“So you admit there may be worse things than death?”
“Is this all a subtle way of telling me that I’m going to go whether I like it or not?”
Hypodermic’s eyes glowed like heated coals. “It’s also a subtle way of telling you to be careful. On the Island of the Gods, some are not as patient and tolerant as we are.”
The sky of Heaven had turned a chill, early morning bleak, and the nuns wading in the water were shivering despite their green rubber thigh boots as they floated the blue-white, wet body toward the others who were waiting on the lakeshore. As they reached the shallows, more nuns got down into the water, soaking the long hems and flowing sleeves of their black habits. Very gently they lifted the corpse that had once been a woman from the water, over the lily pads, and laid it on the grass at the margin the lake. A cartoon deer came into sight from out of a grove of pines, saw what was happening, and turned tail and fled. It was plainly no place for Bambis or bluebirds. The nun Bernadette, who had been leading the search party, detached herself from the shocked group around the body, stripped off her rubber waders, and walked to where Aimee, Semple, and Mr. Thomas were waiting, flanked by a half dozen of Semple’s rubber guards. “It’s her. It’s Mary-Theresa. She’s been strangled and mutilated.”
Bernadette didn’t have to say anything else. Her expression told it all. The slaying was without question the handiwork of the nowvanished Jesus, and she, and presumably at least a majority of the other nuns, held both Aimee and Semple, who had brought him there, directly responsible. The nuns weren’t going to accept the excuse that Mary-Theresa hadn’t really died but only temporarily returned to the Great Double Helix. The suffering that had been inflicted on her before she’d discorporated was more than enough to leave her scarred for her next three or four incarnations, and the nuns wanted payback. If they couldn’t get Jesus himself, the two sisters would be the next best thing.