“Just follow the path. If you start to feel weird, don’t worry about it. Shut everything else out and just keep right on walking until you get to me.”
Semple’s voice faltered. “All these people, these things, what are they?”
“They’re the Voodoo pantheon.”
“The Voodoo . . . ?”
“Don’t even think about it. Just walk, okay?”
“I’m doing my best.”
Haltingly at first, but rapidly gaining strength, Semple made the circuits of the spiral, laboriously coming closer to Jim.
“I think I’m starting to hallucinate.”
“Just try to ignore it. Concentrate on walking.”
The revolutions Semple walked were growing smaller and smaller. It hardly seemed that she was walking toward Jim. She was now just going around and around him.
“Why don’t I just step across to you?”
Jim quickly shook his head. “No way. Don’t even think about it. That would trigger a disaster.”
“What’s going on here?”
“That’s the great mystery.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“That makes you part of a very exclusive club.”
“How can you make jokes?”
“It stops me from clutching my head and screaming.”
Semple came around the final curve, staggering and half falling toward Jim. Jim moved to catch her and bring her into the central circle. In the instant that they touched, however, a light came out of nowhere. Before either Jim or Semple had a chance to react, the two of them were enclosed in a needle of light that lanced straight up to the sky, and they rose right up with it.
In room 1009...
Jim awoke in pain to a vicious morning after in the enclosed TV twilight of a cheap hotel room. The TV set opposite the bed dated back to the early fifties, an antique black and white model with the exposed picture tube mounted above a flat rectangular cabinet that contained the circuitry. The station it had been tuned to had gone off the air, and an electronic snowstorm spattered the screen, providing the only light in the room. The low white noise that accompanied it was the only sound. Jim’s first emotion was a need to kill the TV. If he’d had a gun at hand, he would have put a bullet through the damned thing right there and then and screw the fact that the report might split his suffering skull. The hotel room looked like the kind where a man should have a gun, perhaps a black Colt .45 automatic, under the pillow or in the drawer of the bedside table. The cheaply framed painting above the bed-a rearing rattlesnake on black velvet-said it all. He was in some knocked-off Jim Thompson scenario with a meat-cleaver headache and no clue as to how he came to be there. His monumental motherfucker of an alcohol hangover was further complicated by the fact that Jim, as far as he could reconstruct the pieces of the puzzle, had just awakened from a highly realized nightmare filled with primal figures from some Jungian black museum. He couldn’t recall the details, but he had the distinct impression that the primal figures were urging him to take some action-action both difficult and dangerous. He groaned; all this thinking was causing a shattering agony to lance through his head. “No more, okay? I don’t have the strength yet to crawl from this bed and start looking for clues.”
But he knew he would, even before he reached into the drawer of the nightstand to see if there really was a gun in there. Instead of a gun, he discovered a mirror, about seven by seven inches, with a single-sided razor blade, a section of red and white plastic drinking straw, and an almost immodest quantity of leftover cocaine. Idly and still mainly asleep, he licked his right index finger so some of the white powder would cling to it when he dabbed it on the mirror. When he put his powdered finger in his mouth and rubbed the coke onto his upper gum, he felt an immediate tingle. It was good shit. “Must have been some kind of party here last night.”
Other inanimate telltales of a wild revelry: a bottle of Old Crow with about two inches left in it; two glasses, one with scarlet lipstick smears; an ice bucket with about a half inch of chill water in the bottom; a brimming-over ashtray in which half the butts also bore lipstick traces. A woman had obviously been there. Where the hell was she now?
The ashtray reminded Jim that he wanted a cigarette. Moving his bleary focus a little farther afield, he spotted a crumpled but half-full pack of unfiltered, king-sized Pall Malls. It lay on the floor where it must have been dropped, next to the remnants of a torn slip and a pair of laddered nylon stockings. Clearly he and the woman had done more than just smoke, drink, and snort cocaine. As if he needed further confirmation of debauchery, there were dozens of Polaroid pictures scattered over the floor at the foot of the bed. On the flat top of the dressing table was the big early-model Land camera that must have been spitting prints all night. Jim reached down and picked up one of the nearest pictures. The grainy black and white image was unmistakable: Semple McPherson in a cheesecake standing pose. She was positioned for maximum provocation, in bra, panties, high heels, and black nylons held up by a garter belt, leaning forward to maximize her cleavage, one foot up on a chair, Blue Angel style, revealing a seductive expanse of white thigh. Her eyes stared directly into the camera, made vampire-strange by the reflection of the flash off the back of the retina. Jim reached instinctively to take a hit from what was left in the bottle of Old Crow before he picked up another of the instant prints.
The next image was again of Semple, this time topless, on all fours on the bed. Despite his headache, he leaned forward and gathered up a bunch of the Polaroids. As he rifled through them, they told a clear, if not quite consecutive story, almost an explicit photo strip cartoon, and proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Semple McPherson was absolutely devoid of erotic inhibition. He found himself looking at Semple McPherson bending over, presenting a symmetrical and almost perfect ass to the camera; Semple McPherson in only heels and stockings, legs spread and ecstatically caressing herself for full pornographic impact; Semple McPherson wearing just one stocking, hands tied with the other and gagged with a scarf, struggling against the makeshift bonds; and Semple McPherson, tongue extended, licking what Jim could only assume were his own testicles. He let out a low whistle, pain temporarily forgotten. “Go, girl! I must have been holding the camera at arm’s length to get that one.”
He flipped over more of the cardlike prints and found that he also figured in a good percentage of them. He could only assume that in these cases, Semple had been operating the camera. He appeared exhibitionistically masturbating, eyes closed, hair hanging down, half covering an expression of divine suffering; he appeared, shot from above, kneeling on the hotel carpet kissing Semple’s shoes; another arm’s-length shot revealed him suckling one of her breasts. Another sequence of pictures were of the two of them coupling in variations of an embrace so energetically passionate that it was, at times, hard to tell what limbs or areas of flesh belonged to whom. Jim wasn’t clear how these last pictures could have been taken. Either the camera was set to a time delay, or at some point a third party had been in the room. Another showed Semple half dressed, curled up in an armchair that was not now present in the hotel room, pointing the Land camera at the lens of whatever camera had taken this picture. Where had the second camera come from? While wondering about these logistics, Jim scooped up another selection of prints. At some time during the proceedings, they had become really adventurous. Both Jim and Semple were pictured near-naked in the hotel corridor and even in the elevator, obviously high on the potential risk of discovery.
Jim slowly put down the Polaroids. They were a visual record of a sexual romp that was the complete antithesis of any quick drunken tussle that might later be consumed by a whiskey blackout. This encounter had been of a duration, variety, and escalation that should have remained in his memory. “So why the fuck can’t I remember it?”