“Just go, Jim. I made a promise.”
Jim hesitated for an Afterlife minute, then he turned, as though his brain had given up on the anguish of the choice and only the need to escape was driving him. That and a strange glimpse of the future. “So I’ll be seeing you.”
“I don’t think so . . . ”
Jim’s suddenly smiled. In that instant he trusted the vision of the old house as much as he trusted anything. “Oh yes, you will.”
“What makes you say that?”
“For once, I know something you don’t know.”
Before Semple could respond, Jim turned and walked to the portal. “Okay, Doc.”
Semple called after Jim as Doc dropped into the portal and dematerialized. “What do you mean, you know something I don’t know?”
Jim stepped into the portal himself. “You’ll see.”
Epilogue
On Blue Bayou . . .
Jim leaned on the porch rail with a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Ivory Coast Mamba Beer in one hand and a skinny Jamaican cheroot in the other, watching the sun sink behind the volcanoes and the sky turn bruised-fruit purple. Semple didn’t mind Jim smoking cigarettes in the house; that was a given. But she claimed the cheroots stunk up the place and that Dr. Hypodermic only brought them to piss her off. Both the cheroots and the West African beer came courtesy of Dr. Hypodermic. He always brought a couple boxes of one and a case of the other on his regular visits, along with the rather large parcel of extremely assorted chemicals. Dr. Hypodermic might have tortured Jim once, but now, as a retired agent of the gods, Morrison found himself incredibly well treated. Hypodermic seemed to know when Jim was running low on supplies and would appear well before the situation threatened to become desperate. The only fly in this otherwise impeccable ointment was that Hypodermic and Semple just didn’t get along. Whenever the great and ancient jet-black Rolls-Royce hearse would appear away across the swamp, driving on the surface of the water, swaying slightly on its shimmering private force field, Semple would retreat to the attic of the spooky old house to work on her dark abstract oil paintings and refuse to come out until after the Mystere had departed, which was usually after a couple of relative days of intense narcotic excess.
Jim wasn’t exactly sure what lay at the root of the enmity between the two of them, but knew it had something to do with the fading and ultimate negation of Aimee. Although it had been Danbhala La Flambeau who had brought the freaked- and stressedout Semple to Jim at the house in the Jurassic swamp, it was Hypodermic who had been there when Aimee had finally passed to nothing. He had been around during the demise of the “good” sister and must have seen things that made Semple uncomfortable around him. Semple had never really explained to Jim what exactly went down between her and Aimee that had left her as the lone survivor. He knew in broad terms that, once they were left alone in the wreckage of Heaven, a strange process of transfer had been set in motion: Semple became stronger while Aimee weakened, becoming progressively more ineffectual and transparent. Neither sibling was able to reverse or arrest what was happening to them, and Aimee had apparently gone into almost monstrous bouts of furious recriminations that only served to speed things along. What Jim didn’t know, and was one of Semple’s most veiled and shadowy secrets, was how Aimee had actually departed. All he knew was that it had been highly traumatic, if the state of shock in which La Flambeau had brought Semple to him was any indication.
Semple’s powers of recovery were such that she had recuperated in surprisingly short order; to all outward appearances, she had returned to her old perverse, hedonistic, and curious self. The only detectable scar that remained surrounded Aimee’s passing. No matter how Jim might coax her, when the night grew blue-black late and the brontosauruses sang their low winding trills off among the conifers and giant celery, the subject was strictly taboo. The closest she had ever come to discussing the matter was one night when, after consuming a number of orange and yellow pills washed down by half a bottle of fine cognac, she had smiled enigmatically. “Aimee is no more, my love. She didn’t flex, and thus she broke. And when she broke, it all came to me. Ezekiel 25:17 included.”
Prior to Semple’s unexpected arrival, Jim had spent a long time, unshaven and rootless, on the run with a gun on his hip, wilding with Doc Holliday in all the environments that countenanced that kind of behavior. Eventually, though, he decided it was time to settle someplace and attempt to pull his poetry back together. Doc reminded him constantly that the dead had all the time in the world, but ultimately Jim felt he was compelled to go back to his avowed vocation, if he was to reclaim even a few shreds of his self-respect and not lose himself in the easy out of the drunken spaghetti-western yahoo.
Once Jim settled to it, the writing had been exciting, but after a few hundred pages, mainly concerned with the pantheon he had encountered on the Island of the Gods, it grew too weird to be workable. When he tried a course correction, he went to the other extreme and found that all he could produce was rhyming couplets so mawkish they would have sickened a greeting card hack. He’d attempted to bail himself out with William S. Burroughs cutups, Scrabble tiles, a planchette, all the way to automatic writing, hoping he’d make a little headway even if it had to be by means of chaos, random chance, and spirit intervention.
The wrestling match with his muse had been so thoroughly interrupted by Semple’s arrival that his writing was again put aside as first he helped her, as best he could, regain her strength and equilibrium, and then, with that accomplished, they enjoyed a prolonged and at times quite spectacular honeymoon of depravity that found the two of them raving and rampaging through the echoing rooms of the house in the Jurassic swamp. After this frantic period of red-in-tooth-and-claw renewal, they had settled into a comfortably routine relationship that was both sheltered and secure, if perhaps a little isolated. Not that Jim and Semple lacked for diversion; over and above what they could provide for themselves when motivated by lust, devilment, or ingenuity, Doc Holliday visited on a fairly regular basis, usually crossing the swamp from the Great River in a borrowed launch or speedboat. When Doc didn’t come in person, he wrote long, rambling, and very Victorian letters in a scratchy and curliqued dope-fiend hand. These missives always arrived by bizarre means that Jim assumed was a part of Doc’s correspondence shtick. Often it would be an Aztec runner, with beaded apron, feathers in his braided hair, and oiled body, who would hand the familiar pale parchment envelope to either Jim or Semple without a word and then immediately turn and start jogging back along one of the less soggy trails across the swamp. On other occasions, the improvised mailman was a humanoid amphibian, a gill man who looked like a close cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and who, unlike the taciturn Aztec, expected to be invited in for a while and tipped with cans of sardines, anchovies, or tongol tuna before he swam off. The oddest and most memorable of these deliveries from Doc was brought by a trained eagle with a small leather pouch chained to its left leg. While Jim had removed the letter from the pouch, the eagle had eyed the Mammal with No Name as though the reincarnated western outlaw might make an acceptable snack to speed him on his way.
The Mammal with No Name had moved into the mansion and made himself at home in a compact little nook adjacent to the wine cellar, even before Semple had arrived. He obviously considered Jim’s dark residence an ideal protection against pterodactyls and other Jurassic predators, and Jim, from his side of the arrangement, was actually glad of the company. The accumulation of what Jim later referred to as his and Semple’s own private Addams Family had not stopped with the Mammal with No Name. In the wake of Jim and Semple’s exhaustive and exhausting honeymoon, Mr. Thomas had arrived, looking much the worse for alcoholic wear and obviously hoping to be adopted for at least long enough to recover from his latest epic debauch. He had even offered to assist Jim with his poetry in an attempt to sweeten the bargain. In fact, no bargaining had really been necessary. Although Semple wasn’t terribly fond of the Mammal with No Name, being less than keen on his interminable tall violent tales of the Old West and finding it hard to forgive him for his nun-raping past, she was overjoyed to see the goat, whom she considered a trusted comrade in arms from the fall of Necropolis. Jim, while not being as intimate with the goat as Semple, had no objection to someone who had perhaps once been an illustrious poet becoming a permanent fixture under his roof.