The moment she admitted to being bored, Semple realized that she had made a bad tactical error. Aimee immediately pounced on it. “If you’re so bored, you clearly have the time to help me with what I’m doing.”
“Extending your damned Heaven?”
“What else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not that bored.”
“We would be doing the work of God.”
Although she’d been through this routine countless times before, Semple started to lose her temper. “The fuck we’d be doing the work of God.”
Semple was predictably scandalized. “How can you say that?”
“Because there is no God. There is no God, Aimee. When the fuck are you going to grasp that? Since you died, God hasn’t sent you so much as a fucking postcard, let alone clasped you to his bosom like a little lost lamb. Accept the obvious, woman. God is a no-show. God has stood you up.”
Her outburst was greeted by a long silence. Semple knew she’d wounded her sister, but she wasn’t about to feel any guilt. Aimee would not only get over it, she’d exact payback sometime in the future. “You could do it for me.”
“Like, you’re God?” Semple adopted a Valley girl intonation. She had discovered it during one of the irregular browsings through mortal culture she had made since her death. It was custom-tailored to irritate Aimee.
Aimee, however, came right back at her. “I suppose you could look at it like that.”
“But you’re not God.”
“I’m doing my best.”
Aimee was actually sounding a little frayed; for a moment Semple took pity on her. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I want you to find someone for me.”
“Find someone?” This actually had more promise than Semple had expected. She momentarily savored a vision of herself as Semple McPherson, girl detective. She saw herself in a trenchcoat and an exceedingly cool hat, prowling dark and dangerous streets.
Aimee continued, “I need you to find someone to help me with what I’m doing.”
“Who in their right mind would want to help you enlarge that ridiculous Heaven of yours?”
“They don’t have to be in their right mind. In fact, I’d like them to have as little mind as possible. All I need is someone with enough creative panache.”
“A clean slate?”
“Exactly.”
“A man or a woman?”
“A man would depend entirely on my mood at the time.”
“Either way, you’d get to use your not-inconsiderable powers of seduction.”
“Are you saying you want me to set you up with a man? You want me to procure for you?”
Aimee sounded shocked to the bone. “It would be nothing like that. How could you ever think it?” Semple didn’t find the shock in Aimee’s voice altogether authentic. To her ear, Aimee was protesting too much.
Grinning nastily, Semple continued as though Aimee hadn’t spoken. “It’d be just like old times, wouldn’t it? I reel them into bed, I fuck them, you enjoy the experience from afar, but by never actually emerging until there was a hard-won orgasm to be had, you always left room to pretend it never happened, that you were still God’s own sainted, deep-frozen virgin.”
“It wasn’t like that all.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“It certainly wasn’t. I really don’t know where you get your ideas.”
Semple’s lip curled and her voice turned B-girl tough. “Same place you do, honey. Don’t forget, once we were one.”
Aimee said nothing, and neither did her sister. Semple was aware of the entrance of Igor, her diminutive butler with the popping amphibian eyes and high Germanic voice of Peter Lone. Igor was one of the few denizens of Semple’s domain whom she hadn’t constructed herself. He had arrived out of the blue, driven there by his own twisted, vice-laden fantasies, and since he served her with groveling devotion, she turned a blind eye to his voyeuristic skulking around in furtive observation of her tortures and abuses. He probably wished he were in the place of the angel. Semple let the silence run itself out, just to see what Aimee would come up with next. When Aimee spoke again, her voice had totally changed. Suddenly, as though a dam had burst, she was in tears. “Please help me, Semple, I have no one else to turn to. I know I’m obsessive, but I can’t do this on my own. I really can’t.”
Semple silently cursed her sibling. If Aimee started crying, Semple knew she couldn’t turn her down. It was her great weakness: she was a sucker for the crudely pathetic. It was all she could do to shut Aimee off with a fast provisional agreement. “Okay, okay, I’ll think about it.”
Aimee’s voice disintegrated into a suppressed sob. “You will? Then, we need to talk about it.”
Aimee recovered with amazing rapidity. “I thought we were talking about it.”
“Face-to-face.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I’ll meet you in Golgotha.”
“Does it have to be Golgotha?”
“You made the place, not me.”
Semple could feel Aimee take a deep breath before she answered. Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, the one sector that didn’t fit in the rest of her cutesy-poo Heaven. “Very well.”
“Then Golgotha it is.”
Semple had assumed the conversation was finished, but Aimee had another thought. “You’re always telling me how you need to get out more. This will be the perfect opportunity.”
This last remark was a low blow. Both of them only left their created environments on the rarest of occasions. Semple liked to pretend that she was ready for anything, but, deep in her being, she feared the territories beyond quite as much as Aimee did. She was unsure of herself in those environments that apparently stretched to infinity all around her cozy Hell and Aimee’s Heaven. Aimee, well aware of this, used it against her whenever she could, but Semple didn’t parry the blow. She wasn’t quite ready for another round of sibling conflict, and she just snapped at Aimee. “Like, just meet me in Golgotha, okay?”
No sooner had Semple hung up the golden phone than it vanished. She stood lost in thought. After a long lapse of quasi-time, one of the rubber guards began wheezing loudly. Semple turned and looked at him, then down at the angel. Aimee’s unexpected call had caused her to forget the matter at hand altogether. Semple found she’d lost all previous enthusiasm for continued abuse. She gestured impatiently to the rubber guards, pointing to the bound angel. “Just get rid of him.”
The angel struggled against his bonds. “Please . . . ”
“Or give him to Igor if he wants him.”
“No . . . ” The angel continued to struggle, but Semple had no time for his entreaties. “Do shut up. I need to think.”
An idea was already spawning in the blackest layers of Semple’s intricately devious mind. Oh yes, she’d find Aimee her creative force. She’d find her a genius, but he wouldn’t be the kind to put Aimee’s precious Heaven to rights. She’d find her sister some utter bastard, and see how she liked them apples.
When the music stops, watch out!
White horses moving through the fog
White horses moving through the fog
Tall white horses moving through the
fog Pale horsemen following a red-eyed dog
The old man in the blue-green watered silk suit who called himself Long Time Robert Moore was playing the blues with an inspiration that far surpassed anything mortal. Moore sat in the musicians’ corner of Doc Holliday’s cantina, right beside the upright piano. Ruby, the resident piano player, remained on her stool, but merely watched him, her big-knuckled hands never so much as straying near the nicotine-stained keys. Robert Moore sat bent forward in a hard wood chair, his pearl-gray fedora pulled down so it cast a black-hole shadow where his eyes were supposed to be. Gold flashed on his right hand as he claw-picked with unerring precision. Silver flashed in his left as the stainless steel bottleneck rode the strings. More gold and a lone diamond flashed in his mouth as he sang. Moore had long since hit his stride, and every now and again he registered the fact by allowing himself a faint but knowing smile. He was now into that zone where voice and instrument dovetailed as one, interwoven twin factors of a single intent. The urgent slide guitar figure hummed and spun, chimed like a funeral toll, and then coiled back on itself with the surety of a striking snake. The sound resonated from the instrument’s metal body and commenced a journey that took it, rolling and tumbling, beyond the boundaries of the room, out through the doors and windows and missing walls of Doc’s half-completed cantina, to run echoing down the street and across the surrounding desert’s wild sounding board, finally to return as eerie, delayed reverberation.