Mercifully, Jim found he wasn’t required to walk very far. An open car with a landau top was waiting. It was unlike any car Jim had ever encountered, dwarfing any automobile he’d seen in either dream or life. The hood alone must have been thirty feet long and the tonnage of chrome outweighed that of even the most fancifully customized semi, and that wasn’t to mention the gold trim. From knowledge acquired from his long-lost hot-rod home boys back in the metalflake sixties California of Big Daddy Ed Roth and Rat Fink, Jim knew that the lustrous pearlized finish could only have been achieved by a minimum of twenty-nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer, platinum dust, and exotic fish scales. It was truly the cherry paint job of the gods. The machine might once have been a 1930s movie-star Duesenberg, but it had been stretched, enlarged, extended, and so elaborately curved and curliqued that it was scarcely recognizable. Jim wondered who might create and customize these mobile palaces for the ancient African gods. Did they dream them up themselves and just make them real in a flash of kinetic magic? Or were there somewhere, perhaps in sweating caves under the volcano, holy and secret chop shops where car-culture Leonardos pushed the envelopes of their talent, working with dedication and diligence for their exalted masters?
As Jim and the Mysteres left the pier and approached the supercar, a chauffeur opened the door for them. He wore the uniform of the Baron Tonnerre’s crack honor guard, and seemed to be yet another part human, part demigod kin of the trireme’s drummer, mistress-overseer, and attendants. Two more similarly uniformed outriders waited a little way in front of the car astride two of the largest Harley-Davidsons in creation.
From this first impression, Jim could only assume that the Voodoo pantheon did everything in massive and highly flamboyant style. This was immediately confirmed as the huge car and its outriders moved forward along the crushed-shell gravel road that led away from the harbor. Screened by stands of cypress, groves of palms, and luxurious banks of rhododendron and fire dragon, sprawling and elaborately fanciful mansions were set back from road, some lit flamboyantly like Graceland on a Tennessee summer night, others remaining masked and dark with strange flames sporadically showing at mullioned windows. In parks and gardens that were at one and the same time both wild but carefully tended, fountains sang and sparkled, and fires burned in braziers atop tall stone beacons. Big cats prowled; peacocks strutted; on one opulent lawn a herd of decorative white rhinos grazed on the greensward and cropped the shubbery. While most of these palaces and mansions favored a basic European billionaire luxury from the school of high Beverly Hills or Colombian narco lord, the open supercar twice passed the formidable, thorn-thicket outer walls of much more traditional Royal Zulu kraals from the time of Cetshwayo. He also spotted no less than four domed and minaretted quasi-mosques, a number of brick beehive structures, but with the bricks fashioned from solid gold and silver, outsized opals, and squared-off blocks of emerald and diamond. He even saw one exact reproduction of the White House, and another of the Alhambra.
When he was first told that he was going to the Island of the Gods, Jim had naively expected to find some across-the-board melting pot of religions and denominations, a place where Baal, Quetzacoatl, Crom, and the Lord Krishna all dwelled discreetly, cheek-by-jowl, like some ecumenical Olympus. In this, he discovered he had been extremely and hopelessly wrong. The Island of the Gods proved to be highly segregated, the exclusive turf of the basic Afro-Creole pantheon along with a few related and kindred spirits.
The big Duesenberg went on climbing higher and higher into the island uplands that culminated in the crater of the volcano. After a while, this started to give Jim pause. Although he was insulated by the quantities of god-rum he had consumed on the Ship of Agoueh, the idea did occur to him that, in the name of sundry gods, more than one white boy had been taken up to a volcano never to return. For a while he contemplated jumping out of the car and making a run for it; he decided against this, however, even though the open supercar was actually proceeding up the white shell road at a very stately pace. He’d noticed quite soon in the ride that, although each god was deity of the manor in his or her own enclave, the highways and byways of the island were heavily patrolled by Baron Tonnerre’s red-uniformed troopers with their peaked caps, gold lightning-flash badges, and inscrutable sunglasses even at night. Presumably their mission was to deter and eject interlopers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Even if he did manage to make a break, Jim figured he’d probably last about twenty minutes loose on his own in the tropical paradise, a very strange stranger in a very strange land.
As the crater neared, Jim increasingly worried he might be earmarked for a dive into the magma; then, to his relief, the car turned off and headed toward a projecting headland where two massive carved megaliths supported an even bigger capstone. This upper stone was shaped like an eagle with its wings extended, and the closer Jim came to this towering structure, the more he realized that he was in the presence of something incredibly old, maybe older than humanity itself. This atmosphere of the impossibly ancient begged the hallowed question of whether the gods had been around before man had crawled from the swamp, or if it had taken humanity to validate their existence. Like most right-thinking individuals, Jim had always been of the latter opinion, but the closer the supercar came to the megastructure, the less certain he became.
The white road terminated a quarter of a mile from the megaliths themselves. Beyond where the road ended, a paved walk had been laid that described a huge spiral almost the same quarter mile in diameter. The car halted and the chauffeur climbed out and opened the door for the passengers to alight. The Mysteres indicated that Jim should get out first. He glanced at Danbhala La Flambeau as he stepped down from the car. “And what happens now?”
She gestured to the ancient curving flagged pavement. “You walk the spiral while we wait for the others to come.”
***
Semple was nothing more than a mass of fragments, down with the atoms, only held in the loose amalgamation of a meteor shower by the attraction of a simple internal gravity. The single mercy was that she felt no pain. In fact, she felt hardly anything, as though she didn’t have enough singular integrity to experience any of the usual mental or physical sensations. An anger at Aimee for doing what she’d done seethed somewhere in the backwash of her previous consciousness. An unfocused fear drifted along with the knowledge she was free-falling into a total unknown, without the power to stop or even slow her headlong progress. Even when she’d died, she’d had Aimee with her as part of the composite. Now she was totally alone-more than alone, if the truth were to be told. Many familiar parts of her mind on which she had always depended were now absent, leaving her ill-equipped to deal with the shocks the future undoubtedly had in store. As far as she could tell, she was in Limbo. She had enough memory left to recall that Limbo was a place rarely mentioned in the Afterlife, the ultimate distant nothing to which a soul could be consigned to loiter in the absolute end of the void until it perhaps chanced randomly to drift in the direction of the Great Double Helix. It was probably fortunate that she didn’t have enough emotional makeup left to feel the rush of terror the prospect of Limbo usually inspired. All Semple could really do was dispassionately observe her surroundings, make of them what she could, and wait to see what would happen next.