“As a gentleman, I surely can’t elaborate. It did seem, though, even back then, the manner of her death hadn’t done anything to put her off her taste for flowing scarves.”
“Isadora Duncan, huh?”
“Watch your course there, boy.”
They had passed the bigger ship now, but while Jim’s attention had been fixed on the dancer, he had allowed the launch to drift uncomfortably close to its backwash. He quickly adjusted the wheel and then took a final look at the dwindling form of the near-nude dancer. He grinned at Doc. “Three nights, huh?”
Doc pulled down his hat so his eyes were hidden. “Maybe, in some time yet to come, my boy, you’ll take this Semple McPherson to the same place. If you find yourself doing that, ask for a hostess called Shen Wu. She really likes her work.”
Jim didn’t smile. The idea of this woman who might be in his future filled him with both unrequited curiosity and a strange unease. He turned back to steering a straight course and did his best not to think about her. He knew that kind of obsessive thinking about something he could do nothing about was a guaranteed shortcut to neurosis.
While Jim was trying not to think about the mysterious Semple McPherson, Doc drank in the shade of his hat brim. Each in his own way was too absorbed to notice another, smaller appearance on the river. A hundred yards astern of the launch, the black upper lens housing of a submarine’s periscope broke the surface and peered unblinkingly in its direction.
***
“A woman is a better conductor of heat than steel.”
“What?”
“Aluminum is a better conductor of heat than steel.”
“I have to be dreaming.”
“A shaman is a letter seductor to cheat and steal.”
“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”
But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander; not exactly as lonely as a cloud, but equally ethereal. She knew, however, that this wasn’t one of those times.
“A hymen is abetting the reaction to beat and feel.”
“Stop this now!”
Semple seemed to be somewhere underwater, deep water; somewhere in the depths of a deep body of water, and the repeating, distorting, irritating voice had a deep, sewer-pipe, bubbling sound that bounced and came back at her like the ping pulses of sonar. “A dolmen is-”
“I said, stop.”
The repeating irritating voice changed. It suddenly sounded resentful, querulous. “But I go with the hallucination.”
“I’m trying to rid myself of the hallucination.”
Exotic, multicolored warm-water fishes swam all around her; above her head, a large object, perhaps a submarine or an aquatic reptile, moved purposefully between her and the rippling dapple-green light that had to be the surface of the water. Semple had known at once this was a hallucination. If the atomic cloud had actually somehow returned her to a primal sea of origin and rebirth, some unknown parallel of the Great Double Helix, she knew she’d be accepting it with a lot more resignation. In fact, all she wanted was to fight. She wanted to kick out and swim to the surface and scream in fury at whatever fate had precipitated her into this fine new mess. Moreover, if this were the Helix, she wouldn’t be so goddamned thirsty. Despite being entirely immersed, she was parched, her tongue swollen, her lips threatening to crack. She knew that to slake the thirst, all she had to do was open her mouth, but something told her with that first drink she would also drown, and be swept away to the Great Double Helix.
But how could she drown if she had no body? The realizations and revelations were coming thick and fast. In a flash she knew that the raging, illogical underwater thirst was the only corporeal aspect to this entire new episode. She looked down, or rather, she perceived down and saw . . . nothing, no legs to kick, no arms to power herself upward, no body to move. She seemed to be nothing more than a bubble of consciousness; and her consciousness had no buoyancy. All the time she remained submerged and without physical form, she seemed to be sinking deeper, until the light from above became a vestigial thing. The fish took partners, touched fins, and waltzed in these newly plumbed depths, their own luminescence providing passing mirror-ball highlights in their watery ballroom. She might have stopped to admire this circling aquarial tableau had she not been so consumed with fury; and yet the angrier she became, the faster she sank. “What the hell is going on here? Is this supposed to be some kind of torture? If so, what the fuck did I do? Whoever’s doing this, at least have the balls to show your goddamned self!”
This outburst finally took her all the way to the bottom, where she bounced leadenly on surprisingly hard and resilient mud, and then came to rest, an angry and misshapen balloon, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze from a tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Dark, submarine plants undulated around her with the current; she lay, helpless and immobile, like one more piece of discarded jetsam on the bottom of this unholy sea. Surely this wasn’t her final fate? Was she condemned to remain there, unable to do anything but gather silt and watch the fish dance?
“Oh no, I must be dreaming.”
But how could she be dreaming when she never slept? Semple had not constituted herself for sleep when she had separated from Aimee. At times, her spirit might wander . . .
At the very moment her repeating thoughts began to circle back on themselves, the water miraculously started to fade. The hallucination must have completed its cycle. Her surroundings were increasing insubstantial, and she could feel her body gradually reasserting itself. The sensation was one of rising, going up through the darkness to the light. She was pleased that she wasn’t going to be imprisoned, disembodied, in a sagging, orange plastic sac, but the experience reminded her a little too much of her and Aimee’s death, and that did a lot to temper her relief. This time she was confronted with a new set of illusions, hallucinations, call them what she might. The first arrived in the twilight zone of her ascent. He was a tall, impossibly angular, and scarcely human figure in what looked like a cross between black undertaker’s weeds and white tie and tails. The outfit was completed by a tall stovepipe hat, and the face under that hat was nothing more than a naked skull with glowing coal-ruby eyes. When this bizarre figure moved, it generated flashes of blue electricity. Semple knew she should have been afraid, but somehow she wasn’t-even when the deaths-head face peered into hers so close that she could smell the neglected freezer reek of his breath, and hissed. “Where is Jim Morrison?”
The question made no sense to Semple. “I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”
“I am Dr. Hypodermic and I am looking for Jim Morrison.”
“I just told you, I don’t know any Jim Morrison.”
The naked skull laughed. “You will, my dear, you will.” And with that, it faded away. Body first, then face, ruby eyes remaining long after the rest of it had gone.
She rose on her own for a while longer, until she thought she spotted another figure; but this one remained in the shadows, showing no desire to approach her. For an instant she thought it might be the hooded form of Anubis’s Dream Warden, but she couldn’t be sure. If it was, could he be the author of whatever was happening to her? She had no time to think about it, though. Now angry, nasal, trailer-trash voices were shouting in the gathering nothingness, as though from a great distance, and the things they were saying did not bode well for whatever was next to come.
“Behold the naked harlot.”
“The naked harlot is a trap for the ungodly.”
“The naked harlot is set here as a trap for those who might linger wistfully on the sins of the flesh.”
The ugliness of the tone was one Semple knew well from her life on Earth. She was surfacing among the viciously righteous.