“Okay, this is where I get off.”
He looked around for the Bogart alien but saw no sign of it. The nearest of the small ones took hold of his hand, but Jim slapped it away. “Listen, you little fuckers. My name is James Douglas Morrison and the shit stops here. No way are you getting me on that table. The closest I like to be to the medical profession is on the receiving end of a prescription for narcotics. Take my word for it, kids. Mr. Mojo’s rising.”
The little aliens started to back away. So far, hostility seemed to be having the required effect. Then he spotted one of the taller ones, and it wasn’t backing away. It was coming toward him, holding what looked uncomfortably like a weapon, pointed directly at him. When it spoke, he knew it was Bogart. “I don’t feel good about doing this, sweetheart, but you asked for it. You could have just rolled over and made it easy on yourself, but it seems we have to do it the hard way.”
***
Shortly after she had split with her sibling, Semple had developed the unconscious and annoying habit of compulsively judging her actions against those of the characters in old Joan Collins movies. Obviously she was looking for a way to distinguish herself as the antithesis of Aimee’s milksop blond purity. The problem stemmed from the time, before the split, when she was still working on her new physical persona. In the course of building her image, she had done an extensive study of Collins, starting with Dynasty and working backward all the way to the actress’s low-budget, British errant-teen roles in movies like The Good Die Young. Right after the split, her studies had meshed with the insecurity of being on her own for the first time, and she found herself hardly able to make a move unless she could relate it to a Joan Collins movie. It was almost as though she were using the actress as a sibling surrogate or an invisible friend. Semple had, of course, rigorously trained herself out of the habit, and kept the lapse a close secret ever after. When it suddenly resumed its grip on her as she entered the Throne Room of Anubis, she half concluded that it was due to the stress to which she had been subjected since her arrival in Necropolis. Whatever the reason, from the moment she entered the Throne Room, she couldn’t help but think of herself as being on the Cinemascope set of Land of the Pharaohs.
The rest of Necropolis may have been threadbare and stain-encrusted, but the Palace of Anubis verged on the preposterous in its ancient Egyptian splendor. The color scheme in the Throne Room was turquoise and gold, and the spatial proportions were indisputably epic. As far as Semple could tell, the Throne Room was used by Anubis only for the receiving and overwhelming of guests and deputations from his subject population, but it was the size of at least two basketball courts, divided by twin rows of massive fluted pillars that held up a forty-foot-high ceiling. The walls were decorated with towering murals of gods and demons, all clearly designed to demonstrate Anubis’s dominant role, mentally, physically, and sexually, in the pantheon.
Semple had been instructed to enter the Throne Room through the massive gold double doors that stood at the opposite end of the vast space from the throne itself. As a new arrival, she would come out onto a raised platform and walk down a wide flight of stairs to the main floor. She had been told to wait on the platform, and not descend until Anubis indicated that he wished her to approach. When the signal came, she should go down the stairs and commence the trek of fifty yards or more to the throne. Had Semple not long since convinced herself of her own fabulousness, she might have been overawed by it all.
The preparation for her encounter with Anubis had been even more elaborate than her trials on the Fat Ari show. Under different circumstances, she might have been exhausted by such pampering twice in one day, but the perfection of the finished product made it tolerable if not actually enjoyable. The jackal head might have the direst plans for her, but at least they would be executed in luxury. By this point, Semple was also feeling lucky. Anubis might be steamrollering the Afterlife in the trappings of the god, but she knew that, somewhere, buried deep within him, lurked a stunted and highly insecure human male. For Semple, the manipulation of human males had never presented a problem. Given time, she would have him doing exactly what she wanted.
The prepping for the audience had started with a second full-body scrub and cosmetic makeover. Apparently what had been good enough for Fat Ari’s camera’s hardly made it at the court of the god-king. It wouldn’t have been fair to describe the handmaidens who performed the task as more skilled than Fat Ari’s crew. It was like the difference between Belgian lacemakers and New York garment workers. The handmaidens of Anubis worked in total reverent silence, as though they were embroidering the Bayeaux Tapestry or illuminating holy manuscripts. Given a choice, she would rather have had the constant coarse and caustic dialogue at Fat Ari’s, but she had no complaints with the work of the handmaidens. Fat Ari’s crew had made her lewd and salable, but the handmaidens were making her exquisite.
The makeup artists were followed by the dressers. The costume chosen for Semple was hardly elaborate, a very up-market variation on the standard wraparound skirt, though it came with a highly Egyptienne hawk-wing cape, with wide, built-up shoulders and a pinion motif. It was the precision of its tailoring and the quality of the fabric that truly impressed her. The metallic red, green, and gold shot-silk mixture shimmered and undulated as she moved, like the hot skin of some fantastic molten reptile.
Before she was let loose on Anubis, Zipporah, the primary concubine, a midperiod Catherine Deneuve who ruled the god-king’s seraglio with the iron will of an Afterlife Margaret Thatcher, had instructed her in the correct manner in which to approach their glorious leader for the first time. The short lecture was delivered as a formal, almost theological speech, which seemed only fitting if dealing with a god. At the end, however, as the woman put particular emphasis on how Semple should never, under any circumstances, contradict or disagree with their lord, Semple made a mental note that, as soon as she resolved the questions of her own status and survival, she’d find a way to cut this fool deity down to size.
The gold doors that led to the Throne Room were flanked by a pair of muscular and heavily oiled Nubian guards. Semple had been escorted that far by a retinue of handmaidens, but as they approached the guarded doors the handmaidens halted and Semple was allowed to go on alone. The guards were identical in every respect, as though they had been assembled on the same production line. They stood over seven feet tall, with shaved and shined heads, clad in brief military kilts that left nothing to the imagination. Armed with long gold scimitars, they stared straight ahead, unwavering and not acknowledging Semple in any way as she walked toward them. Zipporah had said nothing about the guards, but Semple, although sorely tempted, refrained from ogling them. Without so much as a lingering sideways glance, she walked through the gold doors and out onto the platform at the head of the stairs, and was treated to her first glimpse of Anubis.
What confronted her, in fact, was not one but two versions of the god, Anubis in the flesh and also a giant sculpted likeness. Anubis himself sat in the Mighty Throne of the God, and the Mighty Throne of the God stood on an elevated dais between the massive feet of a ceiling-high statue of himself hewn from polished black volcanic rock and highlighted with flourishes of gold and precious stones. Lit from below by recessed banks of constantly moving spotlights, the glowering statue sat four-square and formal in its own sculpted throne, arms crossed across its chest, stone hands gripping the traditional power symbols of the reaping hook and flail. In total contrast, the real Anubis sprawled in his throne, studiedly decadent, with one long bronzed leg cocked over the armrest. Like the statue above him, the live Anubis was arrayed in gold. A short gold kilt was wrapped around his hips; a massive, beaten-gold collar was draped around his neck and extended clear to his navel.