“And barbecue each piece as he’s forced to watch.”
Semple determinedly shook her head. “No barbecue. No cannibalism.”
The traditionalists began shouting again. “Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
“Crucify him!”
Aimee was determined to have the last word; ever the traditionalist herself, she decided to stick with the tried and tested. “Behold the man! He shall be crucified.”
The crowd broke into wild applause. Jesus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait a minute . . . ”
Aimee looked at Bernadette. For once, they were in complete accord. “Is there a fresh cross?”
“There is.”
“Nails?”
“All we need. It only takes three.”
“Just wait a minute . . . ”
“Then take him to Golgotha and make it so.”
As Jesus was dragged away kicking and screaming, Aimee turned on Semple. “Now it’s your turn.”
“What do you mean, it’s my turn?”
“You brought that monster here, didn’t you?”
“I told you he wasn’t any real Jesus Christ, and you were more than happy to go along with the gag.”
Now that they were alone, Aimee was almost hyperventilating. “Is that what you thought it was? A gag? Just one of your accursed pranks? Do you know what you’ve done to me? Bernadette and her nuns will be at my throat the moment they’ve finished with your damned Jesus.”
Semple hadn’t realized just how tightly wrapped her sister really was. “I didn’t know he was a serial killer, goddamn it.”
“That’s your trouble, isn’t it? You never do know, do you?”
“Are you aware what I went through just to get him for you?”
“From the feedback I got, it looked like you were whoring your way across the Afterlife, and finding that creature was nothing more than an afterthought.”
Now Semple was losing her temper. “Yeah? Is that what you think?”
Aimee was turning red in the face, an effect that verged on the grotesque with her pale complexion and golden hair. “You don’t give a damn about me, do you?
Semple smiled nastily. “Why would I? As you keep telling me, I’m no good. I’m the whore, aren’t I? I’m the evil twin.”
Semple realized she shouldn’t have smiled. Aimee lost all control and began to vibrate; she was building up a head of destructive force that, when it reached a crucial peak, she would launch at Semple, blasting her to kingdom come. “Don’t start vibrating like that; you’ll hurt someone.”
Aimee’s voice became powerfully strange; Semple would have suspected demonic possession if she hadn’t known better. “Do you know how much I hate you?”
Semple raised a defensive vibration of her own. The two sisters were now close to violent conflict. “Of course I know how much you hate me. That’s why we separated. I really wouldn’t try to do anything to me, though. You’d have a lot of trouble surviving without me; you saw how things fell apart when I was away from here.”
Logic made no dent in Aimee’s fury. “And do you know how much, above everything, I hate knowing I have to keep you around?”
The sound of hammer blows came from away in Golgotha and Jesus started screaming. Semple half turned, momentarily distracted. Her guard dropped, and in the nano-instant Aimee struck.
***
Jim stepped ashore on the Island of the Gods to the sound of drums. Drums were beating all over the tropical island, and complex crossrhythms pulsed through the warm, sweet, slightly sticky air. He was already accustomed to having everything accompanied by a hollow and echoing throb, like a universal and collective heartbeat. Drums had hammered on the trireme, keeping the rowers to their designated stroke. The drummer on the galley sat central and elevated, sternward on the well deck, behind and above the tiers of oarsmen, pounding his mallets into the hard hide heads of his twin kettledrums with massive repetitive strokes of his tree-trunk arms. The drummer in his loincloth and oiled torso, and the tall broadshouldered female overseer in studded leather who wielded the whip, could almost have been brother and sister. With the woman standing well over seven feet tall and the drummer possessed of muscles beyond the wildest steroid dreams of any human bodybuilder, they seemed to be some midpoint hybrid of man and god, like the legendary Hercules or the Titans.
The trireme was longer, sleeker, and of tighter trim than the other galley that Jim had seen plowing up the Great River, but it still used bench-chained prisoners for propulsion. On his arrival Jim had wondered why the Voodoo gods didn’t use zombies to provide the manpower for the galley. He had pointed this out to Danbhala La Flambeau, who had shaken her head as if to suggest that Jim had watched too many cheap horror movies. “Zombies were ruined by George Romero, boy. These are Obeah submissives who love every minute of it.”
Jim’s major surprise had been, of course, that he, Dr. Hypodermic, and Danbhala La Flambeau hadn’t simply wind-walked directly to the island, but had set down in this galley, which was, as far as Jim could estimate, lying some ten miles off the night-shrouded coast. They had jaunted from the Crossroads to the boat by the same kind of instant special shift that Hypodermic had employed to take him to Vietnam, the padded cell, and all the rest of the locations that they had visited, and he couldn’t understand why the boat was needed as an intermediate stopover. When he asked about this, he’d received another impatient reply. “This is the transit point, the Ship of Agoueh. Everyone has to come in this way. We can’t just have people floating directly to the Island of the Gods. If we allowed that, we’d go the way of Hell and be reduced to nothing more than a tourist park.”
Not that finding himself at sea bothered Jim unduly. He actually welcomed the time aboard to acclimate to the idea that he was entering a whole new phase of his Afterlife. He was able to lean on the rail of the quarterdeck where the gods took their ease, while dolphins, orcas, and undulating manta rays lazily shadowed the boat, marlins jumped in the mid-distance, and families of sea monkeys danced in the purple troughs of the gentle swell of what, to Jim’s mind, couldn’t be anything but Byron’s wine-dark sea. He did note, however, that he was yet again traveling across the Afterlife by water and he wondered, as he stared at the approaching island, whether there was any symbolic or mystical significance to the fact that so many of his recent journeys were by made by way of river, sewer, swamp, or ocean.
The appearance of the island itself revealed very little, just a dark mass in the soft deceptive night with the red lava glow of a volcano at one end of the landmass. Jim looked a little dubiously at the volcano. He’d seen quite enough hot angry mountains lately and he hoped they weren’t becoming another recurrent motif. He couldn’t raise much enthusiasm for an Afterlife spent slowly sailing past volcanoes. He did suppose, however, that the Island of the Gods couldn’t really exist without one. Presumably some of the inhabitants actually needed to live inside it. But the red lava glow wasn’t the only illumination on the island. A thousand points of light, either moving or static, indicated that the Island of the Gods was anything but underpopulated. They winked and twinkled like tiny gems, instilling the place with the needed quality of magic, even from a distance.
Another advantage to the brief interval on the boat had been the attendants. The tall, slender, coffee-colored Amazons looked as if they came from the same basic gene pool as the drummer and the woman with the whip, and they seemed to have the sole purpose of keeping the passengers satisfied. They served him rum-based fruit drinks that came complete with slices of pineapple and small paper umbrellas. One had even offered to give him a rubdown with herbs and hot oil. Jim had been sorely tempted, but he’d shot a covert glance across the quarterdeck to where the three Mysteres were deep in earnest conversation in a bizarre and lilting Creole patois. In addition to the Doctor and Danbhala La Flambeau, the Baron Tonnerre was also aboard the Ship of Agoueh. Indeed, he had been waiting in one of his elaborate, bemedaled uniforms when they’d arrived on board. The original trio was again complete, and Jim decided that maybe a massage was too frivolous for an occasion invested with such gravity, even if no one was about to tell him why. He passed up the hot oil and herb rubdown and settled for a succession of the powerful rum drinks. As a result, when the trireme shipped its oars and moored at the pier, and Jim finally descended the gangplank, he was more than three parts drunk and walking a little unsteadily.