To say that Anubis was well built was an almost ridiculous understatement. The human body of Anubis was the buffed peak of iron-pumping perfection, although Semple seriously doubted that the god ever did anything as gauche as actually pump iron. Even seen from a distance, his divine muscle definition was clear beneath a skin that was the color of oil-dark antique leather. Semple couldn’t exactly estimate his height while he sat, but she imagined that, like his Nubians, he was well in excess of seven feet tall. What surprised Semple, even as accustomed as she was to bizarre Afterlife fantasy fulfillments, was the way his jackal head was married to the human body. The only slightly ambiguous feature was the god’s rather odd conical neck, but his advanced physique seemed more than adequate to support it.
As Semple might have expected, the god was not alone in his Throne Room. Two more Nubian guards stood on either side of him with grim expressions and scimitars across their chests. Three near-naked handmaidens sat at his feet, pouring his wine, caressing his legs, and offering him gold platters of exotic finger foods. The guards and the girls conformed exactly to formula. The final figure in the tableau at the far end of the Throne Room was a lot less predictable. It looked like a Carthusian monk in its full-length robe. The cowl was pulled forward so the face was hidden, and the figure filled Semple with a sudden unease. The shadowy being remained out of the halo of light around Anubis, keeping him- or herself half in the shadows behind the throne. Semple could only assume that this was the classic gray eminence, the all-powerful, whispering advisor who had the ear of the despot, and the capacity to make or break rivals and lesser mortals. Semple knew from both experience and history that such individuals could be deeply and fundamentally dangerous.
Even as these thoughts were going through her mind, the figure in gray leaned forward and spoke into the god’s ear. Anubis’s head turned sharply and he looked in Semple’s direction with the suddenness of a predatory bird. As the self-created god stared at her, a spring of healthy subversion bubbled up inside her, in the form of an urgent and almost overwhelming need to giggle. Something about Anubis had suggested the kind of absurdist, devastatingly funny idea that comes with prolonged anxiety and fear. From certain angles, Anubis, with his pointed, erect ears, looked like Batman with a grafted-on canine muzzle. Semple had suddenly seen Anubis as nothing more than a composite of the Caped Crusader and a cartoon dog. Then Anubis gestured in her direction, and the comic vision fled. The voice was, if anything, even more overpowering in the flesh than it had been when she had heard it over the speakers of the computer in the doctor’s office. “Semple McPherson, you will now approach us.”
Semple took a deep breath, straightened her back, and started down the steps, doing her best to look as impressive and dignified as possible. Joan Collins would have been proud of her. It was only as she was halfway across the vast expanse of pristine marble that she remembered how, in Land of the Pharaohs, Joan Collins had been tied to a pillar and flogged-then buried alive at the end of the movie.
***
Without thinking, Jim grabbed the arm of the nearest little creature and swung it as hard as he could at the Bogart alien. From that first moment of action everything seemed to run in slow motion. Jim was amazed at how light the alien was. He was able to pick it up as easily as a Styrofoam doll, something he would never have been able to do with a human child of comparable size. “That’s right, you little gray sons of bitches! Run away! Get the hell away, you big-eyed cock-suckers! You’ve got a fighting-mad human on your hands now. I’m not one of your shell-shocked abductees! I’m a real representative specimen. One of the badass monkey tribe. All we had to do was invent fire and the fulcrum and there was no holding us. We pretty much fucked up our entire planet, so it shouldn’t be so hard to fuck up a few of you!”
Jim turned. What he needed was a weapon. All rational moderation had left him. He didn’t care that he’d come aboard the spacecraft of his own accord. He didn’t see how that gave the aliens any reason to assume they could interfere with him in any way they wanted. The fact that doing random damage in a UFO in flight might have been a suicidal act also didn’t bother him. Hadn’t he, when drunk, bored, and self-destructive, tried to open the emergency door of a Pan Am DC9 somewhere over the Rockies, in flight between Los Angeles and Chicago? For the satisfaction he’d gain from devastating the saucer, he was, at that moment, quite prepared to go back to the pods of the Great Double Helix.
The Bogart alien was down, pinned under the arms and legs of the creature that Jim had used as a missile. Jim started toward the operating table. Somewhere amid the trays of surgical instruments, he ought to be able to find a decent weapon. He spotted an object about ten inches long that looked like a bone saw, seized it, and turned, ready to fight to the finish. The bad news was that, as far as Jim was concerned, the finish had come. Bogart had disentangled himself from the other two and was crouched on his knees, holding the strange cylindrical weapon in a very businesslike, two-handed grip.
Only rage prevented Jim from realizing that he didn’t have a chance. If he’d had any sense he would have dropped the saw and given up. Instead, he rushed straight at the alien with the weapon. The flash of its discharge totally blinded him. He could feel nothing, so he didn’t know if he was still on his feet or not. All he could see was an unrelieved vibrant blue, and that was all Jim Morrison wrote.
***
The purple tongue of Anubis darted out and licked surplus horseradish dip from his dog muzzle. The tongue was long and spatulate and reached all the way to his dog whiskers. With the sole exception of his larynx and voice box, the workings of the head of the god-king of Necropolis were so entirely canine that Semple wondered if his tongue tended to loll in hot weather. She actually found it hard to gauge where man ended and dog started. Some other more intimate questions regarding the purple tongue of Anubis also posed themselves at the periphery of her curiosity, but, as Anubis was in the process of subjecting her to an intense visual scrutiny and seemed about to speak, she put all speculation on hold.
Looking her up and down, Anubis portentously cleared his throat. “If you’re considering lying to us or weaving some long and fanciful story to explain your arrival in our reality, I really wouldn’t bother. We know all about you, Semple McPherson.”
Leaning forward in his throne, he picked a strip of raw sirloin from the silver platter. It was hard to tell if Anubis ate all the time, or whether he was using this initial encounter between them as an excuse for a protracted snack. The platter of sirloin treats was supported by one of the handmaidens, acting as a human side table. The young woman was all but naked, wearing only body paint, thonged sandals, a gold and turquoise necklace, and a matching gold chain around her waist. Anubis dipped the sliver of meat into a bowl containing a mixture of mayonnaise, sweet mustard, and creamed horseradish proffered by a second handmaiden in a blue silk turban, a giant opal in her navel. Having liberally coated the morsel with dip, the god-King raised it above his black button nose, lifted his head slightly, and dropped it into his mouth. He closed his eyes and stared to chew, relishing the experience with a gratuitous and noisy display of enjoyment that Semple considered indecent. When he had finally finished and run his tongue around his mouth for a second time, he returned to his inspection of Semple.