The plaintive cry jogged loose the realization: the Jungian dream hadn’t been a dream at all. Pieces began to link themselves together into the full picture. He had been in the casino; Lola had warned him to leave; then he’d been hijacked by Dr. Hypodermic and run through a tour of illusion that had culminated in an unclear sequence of noise and spiral disturbance, of an island of strange gods and violent light. It was possible that what had gone down between him and Semple was simply another illusion, and yet, as far as he knew, you couldn’t take Polaroids of a hallucination. Unless, of course, what he was going through now was the illusion . . .
“Hold it!”
Jim put the brakes on this train. He slowly and carefully lit another cigarette, hoping that the familiar and comfortable action would slow his racing thoughts. To deal with the truckload of paradox and confusion, he needed more than the last inch of Old Crow. He needed coffee. He needed a Bloody Mary. He needed room service. He needed to find out where this funky hotel was located. He reached for the old black bakelite rotary phone, but before he could pick it up, it let out an earsplitting jangle. Jim jerked and stared in horror at the thing as though it were the living cousin of the rattlesnake on black velvet. He took a long drag on the Pall Mall to calm his nerves and picked up the heavy black handset. “Hello?”
“Jim?”
“I think so.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, for chrissakes.”
“Semple?”
“Who the fuck else would it be? Is there something wrong?”
“I’m very hungover.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Could I ask you what might sound like a strange question?”
“I would have thought, after living on bourbon, depravity, and room service for almost a week, you could pretty much ask me anything. We even sent out for a pair of instant cameras.”
“Where am I?”
***
Semple glanced over her shoulder, peering around the hotel lobby through the glass of the old folding-door phone booth. Two hookers and a junkie, waiting for the pay phone, were shooting her hostile looks. Why the fuck had Morrison taken it into his head to hole up in the sleaziest hotel in all of Hell? The junkie was plainly jonesing out; the hookers had their own urgent telephonic needs. She wasn’t about to indulge Jim if he was in the throws of some lunatic fugue. “We’re in Hell, you idiot. Where do you think we are?”
“In Hell?”
“In room 807 of the Mephisto Hotel in the Third Circle, just down the street from the Grand Elevator Concourse. Is that precise enough for you?”
“Does the name Danbhala La Flambeau mean anything to you?”
“Of course it does. She’s stopped by three times to see how we were doing.”
“And has anything strange happened to you recently?”
“I woke up earlier with a tattoo I never had before. A rattlesnake on my left shoulder that I never would have chosen for myself. Does that qualify?”
“I guess so.”
She could hear the confusion in his voice. She knew Jim had a few missing parts that caused him to meander in and out of reality, but this was hardly the time to be losing control. She would have thought that, after the way they had been pushing the one-on-one envelope, he would have been solidly centered and fully focused. Semple had always believed that the phrases “fucking one’s brain out” was highly inaccurate. Excessive sex tended to make her sharper, more perceptive, and highly energized.
“Listen, my love, whatever’s going on with you, just can it, okay? We’ve got a problem and there’s no time for any cosmic wandering. You do know you’re dead, don’t you?”
Now Jim sounded impatient. “Of course I know I’m dead.”
“Just checking.”
The junkie was now peering through the glass of the phone booth. At any moment he was going to start banging on the door. “Listen carefully, Jim. This is important. We’ve got a problem.”
“What problem?”
“Doc’s in trouble.”
“Doc Holliday?”
“What other Doc do you know?”
“There’s a Dr. Hypodermic.”
“I don’t think he’d ever need your help.”
Jim had obviously forgotten that Danbhala La Flambeau had taken the time to fill Semple in on everything that had gone before with Jim and the gods-or that she’d gone on to tell them that they could amuse themselves in any way they liked until Doc surfaced but, at that point, their mission would begin in earnest.
“Doc’s in room 1009, in a poker game that’s now well into its seventh day.”
“Doc wouldn’t welcome us dragging him out of a game.”
“He’s in there with some deeply dangerous people. They’ve started playing for really weird stuff, bits of each other’s being, hearts, minds, and souls. He’s got to get out of there. He needs some kind of intervention so he can walk away while he’s still intact.”
Jim sounded a great deal less vague, like he was rising to the challenge. “And the game is right here in the Mephisto?”
“Like I said, room 1009.”
“So I’ll throw some clothes on and get up there.”
“I want to come with you.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Good idea or not, I don’t want us getting separated right now.”
“Suit yourself.”
By now the junkie was pressing his face to the dirty glass of the phone booth and tapping on the door. “Listen, Jim, I’ve got to go. I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together and then I’ll meet you by the elevator.”
As Semple stepped out of the booth, the junkie all but knocked her aside, barging past her, sweating and snarling. “You holding a fucking telethon in there?” The hookers also gave her dirty looks, but she ignored them. For the ten minutes she was allowing Jim to get himself dressed and in motion, she went into the coffee shop and bought a donut and a cup of greasy metallic coffee. The Mephisto was not noted for its cuisine, which Semple suspected had a lot to do with the quality of the clientele. In the steam and grease atmosphere, enclosed by sweating plastic panels and under merciless overbright, overhead neon, unshaven and conspiratorial men in long overcoats, anarchists perhaps, or Bolsheviks, huddled in groups of three or four at dirty tables, drinking soup and black tea while apparently plotting strange insurrections among the dead. Young women in shapeless clothing, pale as the corpses they had left behind on Earth, sat by themselves, shutting out the world with paperback anthologies of Emily Dickinson and the works of Virginia Woolf. Junkies and other addicts twitched furtively and tried not to contemplate the possible horrors of the immediate future. Cold-looking street women and lipstick boys sipped coffee while they rested their psyches and their feet. Semple took her coffee to a table occupied by a solitary woman in a simple cape and leotard, and the most elaborate pair of boots Semple had ever seen. Between foot and thigh, each boot must had over two dozen tiny buckles holding it fastened.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
The woman shook her head. “Of course not.”
Semple seated herself and picked up the donut. It was forty-eight hours stale. “That’s really an amazing pair of boots.”
The woman’s expression was entirely neutral. Her skin was coffee-colored and she had a small red caste mark in the exact center of her forehead. “Many people tell me that.”
At the end of the allotted ten minutes, Semple got up and, leaving a third of the aging donut and half of the cup of deadly coffee, walked out of the coffee shop and headed for the elevators. The woman in the buckle boots watched her as she made her exit and then continued to stare after her through the steamed-up glass of the window.
***
Semple was right, Jim noted as he closed the door behind him. It was room 807. In the time since Semple had phoned, a great deal had come back to him-most of the events on the Island of the Gods, up to the point where the light had come down and whisked them away. To his deep chagrin, however, the recent days of what Semple had described as “bourbon, depravity, and room service” were still a total and frustrating blank. Still worrying about his lessthan-complete memory, Jim started down the corridor just in time to cross paths with a large brown rat with a pink naked tail that slipped out of a door marked STAFF ONLY. The rat looked up at Jim as though he had a full and equal right to be in the corridor. “Hey, Morrison, you know Doc’s on the tenth floor and he’s not doing too well.” The rat had a thick Irish brogue.