Beneath her was a micro-world where shiny billiard-ball protons and neutrons circled majestically around clumped spheroid nuclei, and electrons sparked and flashed in spectacular displays of red, blue, and yellow primal fireworks. A small shard of her being was able to appreciate the beauty of it all. She had always imagined that the subatomic world would be a black empty space and an appreciative fraction of what remained of her mind was surprised at the jostling density of this new environment, but it also reminded her that this might not be a real subatomic environment, merely a personal interpretation of the completely unknowable.
As she drifted farther, she began to see that the animated complexity of spheres and lightning had a finite limit. At something like a curved, if not clearly defined, horizon, the bouncing, oscillating atoms and the flashing electrons ended in a seething margin of quantum foam, and beyond that was a seemingly endless black nothing, empty but for a tiny, multicolored, glowing helix. Semple knew this was the Great Double Helix, but so far away it was reduced to the insignificance of a distant nebula. Aimee’s anger had pushed her unimaginably deep into the unknown. How long would she drift helplessly before she reached a point where the pods might draw her in, and set her on the laborious uphill path to a fresh incorporation? If she got lucky and even reached the distant Double Helix, enough of her sanity might not remain for her to be worth a new persona or a new incarnation. It was lucky she didn’t have too much capacity for forward-looking fear; otherwise she might have started screaming right there and then, embarking on the lurch into dementia with no further ado.
She had assumed that the long wearisome drift into the void would be one of uniform, uneventful tedium. But then the flames appeared, directly in her path at the edge of the void, and she had to revise that idea.
***
Danbhala La Flambeau had called to Jim as he started along the path of the spiral. “Whatever happens, don’t stop until you reach the center. It’s vitally important that you don’t stop under any circumstances.”
Jim had almost stopped right there and then. His first reaction was to get the hell out, and fast. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to get the hell out to, so Jim continued along the curve of the ancient paving at a reserved saunter. If he couldn’t escape, he was probably best advised to do like Danbhala La Flambeau had told him. On the other hand, he saw no sense in rushing to whatever awaited him when he’d finished traveling this series of ever-decreasing circles.
As Jim completed his first half circle and the path led him past and away from the standing stones, the other gods started to arrive. Some arrived in custom variations of the giant limousine that had brought Jim to the standing stones-Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and Hirondels, a Cord and even an enormous Packard Patrician. Others came by more outlandish means. Marie-Louise, a frail and incredibly old woman in a mantilla and black lace shawl, drove up in an ornate open phaeton, with skeleton driver and footmen and drawn by six black horses, all wearing plumes as though for a funeral. Sarazine Jambe and Clairmesine Clairmeille both appeared in entities of pulsing, revolving light like the one that had, all that time ago, brought La Flambeau, Hypodermic, and Tonnerre to Doc Holliday’s township. The frighteningly beautiful ErzulieSeverine-Belle-Femme insinuated her presence into the area in something similar, a scintillating, undulating, and sinuously dancing aura of perfumed sexuality made glowing, dancing energy. The military form of Ogou Baba, dressed in the white cloak and spiked helmet of a Mamluk, with a gold saber hanging from his belt, rode up on a stamping, snorting, black-as-night stallion. Captain Debas thundered in, kicking up gravel, on an antique Norton motorcycle.
Jim had never seen these new gods before, but their names seemed to reverberate in his head: Kadia Bossou, Baron Le Croix, Mam’zelle Charlotte, Erzulie Taureau, Zantahi Medeh, Ou-An Ille, Gougonne Dan Leh, Man Ivan, An We-Zo, Zaou Pemba, Ti Jean Pied-Cheche, Papa Houng’to. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, they gathered around the outer perimeter of the spiral. Every single one of them would have been enough on his or her own to strike terror in the bravest of mortals; en masse, they were formidable to the point of overkill. Towering figures, in robes and headdresses, uniforms or the alluring near-nudity of Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme. Some weren’t even in any approximation of human form. Erzulie Taureau was a massive Babylonian bull with gilded horns and garlands of orchids, Adahi Loko was a similarly exotic elephant, and Baron Azagon was nothing more than a living flame. As they crowded and jostled for position, auras collided and sectors of energy sparked shorts of power, headdresses bobbed and weaved, and the saber of Ogou Baba became entangled in the flowing train of Mam’zelle Charlotte, while his stallion plunged and pranced, nervous in such a vibrant crowd. The only god who was given absolute space to go and do where and what she liked was the venerable Marie-Louise.
The spectacle was such that Jim would have stopped and stared openmouthed, but Danbhala La Flambeau had told him not to stop for any reason, and he wasn’t about to buck that program now that the gods had arrived. Jim went right on walking. La Flambeau hadn’t told him not to look, and as he walked he took in every detail of this sight that few, if any, mortal humans had ever witnessed. Maybe, if he came through all this intact, he really would return to his poetry. The gathering was so close to impossible that it just had to be recorded. At the same time, though, Jim could feel that something was happening to him. Cultures as far apart as the Anastazi in New Mexico and the Druids in England had employed the power of the spiral in their religious and ecstatic ceremonies and rituals. The belief had been that to walk the spiral was, in many ways, an intoxication similar to ingesting yage, peyote, or psilocybin, and as Jim progressed along the endless circular path to the center, he started to subscribe very strongly to that arcane belief. At first it was hard to tell if anything was really amiss, whether he might be entering an altered state. To spot a hallucination is hard in a place where reality at its most normal is an almost hallucinatory condition.
By the third circuit, however, Jim was well aware that the gods had started to lurch and flow one into another, and even the ground beneath his feet was taking on some unique tactile wave patterns. Jim was getting strangely high, flying without benefit of wings, but it certainly wasn’t an unpleasant experience. He could hear the soaring tone of a distant Jimi Hendrix guitar echoing out from some other place on the mountain, and it occurred to him to question why Jimi, the Voodoo Child, wasn’t there at the gathering. He certainly deserved his place. Maybe he was elsewhere on the island, maybe the echoing guitar was real. Jim recalled their obscenely drunken nights at Steve Paul’s Scene in New York City and the last time the two had seen each other at the troubled British open-air rock festival on the Isle of Wight, just human weeks before the two of them had died. “If you’re here, man, get on down and help me out.”
Jim wasn’t joking. His legs were becoming increasingly rubbery and he was having some difficulty staying on the curving path. The inclination to lurch off to the left was increasingly powerful, but La Flambeau held him to making every effort to stay the course. No help came, however. Quite the reverse. The gods seemed to believe that Jim was the key to something and each had something to say to him. They talked at him in a way that made the words throb physically in his head, drowning out the sound of the guitar.