Blown out or not, self-deluded or not, this wasn’t the time to be thinking about it. Following the curve of the river was a little harder than Doc Holliday had made it seem. High formidable cliffs loomed on either side of the narrowest channel they had yet encountered. The Styx had carved deep into the landscape, producing cliff walls with high curved overhangs, and ran fast and choppy, creating small white wavelets as it went into each tight turn. The launch, although powerful, had to run hard to make headway against the stream and repeatedly bucked the flow. Jim had to use both hands to maintain control of the wheel and keep the craft on a straight course. Any serious deviation would have been treated by the river as an invitation to hurl the boat into the rock face and smash its deep varnished panels into matchwood.
“You all right up there, Jim lad?”
“Shipshape and Bristol fashion, Skipper.”
“You just keep it that way.”
“She needs a firm hand now and again.”
“Don’t they all, kid.”
“You say Gehenna’s just around the bend.”
“You just focus on the firm hand, boy. You’ll see Gehenna in all its gory glory soon enough.”
***
“Stone the whore!”
At first Semple was blind. The only information she was receiving was aural and tactile. She knew she had returned to her familiar body, which was of some comfort, but this was offset by the indignity of being stretched out on her back, totally without clothes, on hard stony dirt, staring straight up into a blindingly bright sun in a dangerously clear sky. She was covered by a fine layer of dust that even packed her nose, mouth, and ears, as though, in temporal reality, she had been lying there for quite some time. She also sensed that a number of people were standing over her. Presumably the ones who were talking about stoning the whore. It was possible that she wasn’t the whore in question, but she wasn’t holding out too much hope. Luck had hardly been with her on this adventure. Pain shot through the muscles of her arm as she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. She really had been lying there a long time. As her vision gradually returned, she could make out dark shapes leaning into her field of vision, peering down at her through the sundogs and colored retinal burn. They were talking about her.
“I say get her on her feet and whip her out to the badlands.”
“Stoning her would be quicker.”
“She’s right. We can’t waste any time today. The Patriarch is in a foul temper. He wants to make twenty miles by nightfall.”
One voice had a particularly snide and insinuating tone. “Maybe he’ll change his mind when he gets a look at her. A good punishment could be just the thing to improve his mood.”
As Semple’s eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the darker shapes began to assume form. Now she was looking up into a circle of faces that were as coarse, malformed, and ignorant as any that could be found in any part of even the darkest backwoods of Arkansas or Mississippi. Narrow, suspicious eyes peered down at her from under low brows and lumpy foreheads. A hand came toward her, but she ducked away from it with a snarl. “You won’t touch me if you know what’s good for you.”
The hand jerked back. Just as on Earth, Semple thought, trash was trash and you had to show it who was boss. Despite all of her disorientation and naked vulnerability, she had to take the offensive. Whatever might happen to her here, it could hardly be worse than what she had been subjected to at the hands of Anubis, Fat Ari, Mengele, and the rest. She was heartily sick of being shoehorned into a whimpering victim role. This time, she’d be damned if she was going to take it lying down, literally or otherwise. She snarled again and the circle around her backed off. The snarling routine seemed to be working, so she tried it a third time, with even more feeling, using it as a cover while she rolled over to get her hands and knees under so she could spring to her feet with a quick leap. As soon as she was on two legs, she dropped into a simian defensive crouch. She knew she probably made a scary enough sight to begin with, and she hoped that behaving like a feral thing might spook them entirely. If these fools believed she was some kind of desert djinni, some banshee she-devil, let them. Just as long as they stayed good and terrified, they’d be much less likely to start reaching for the rocks they’d seemed so gung-ho to start hurling a few moments earlier.
She turned slowly; snorting through her nose with what she hoped was sufficiently demonic ferocity. It certainly seemed to be working. The circle around her retreated another couple of paces. She continued to turn, acting every inch the cornered succubus, carefully observing all the while. The small crowd was completely composed of women, although, a short distance away, a number of men and a flock of scrawny, black-faced sheep stood staring; dealing with she-demons was women’s work. The women in question were possibly the ugliest and most depressing collection of broads she had ever encountered. Perhaps she could somehow turn this to her advantage. If these horrors were a representative sample of local womanhood, the men might well be drawn to their sheep; given the look of the men, the sheep were the ones truly getting the shitty end of the deal. And Semple knew whereof she spoke. The camp meetings they had run when she and Aimee were alive and one, starting out on the rocky road to fame and fortune in the evangelism racket, had attracted more than their fair share of the benightedly repugnant. This bunch clearly thought of themselves as the Children of Israel in a wilderness straight out of the Classics Illustrated Book of Exodus, but to her they resembled nothing more than a bunch of Ozark inbreds without even the benefit of dilapidated Ford trucks. She had managed their kind before; if they didn’t immediately turn violent, she could manage them again.
The women came in all shapes and sizes, from eating disorder blubber to rawboned and desiccated. They were all dressed in cheap, coarse, Old Testament homespun, but their faces made them look like Elvis’s educationally challenged cousins on his daddy’s side: sour, mean, and ignorant, with built-up heads of resentment that stretched back so many generations it was encoded in their DNA. One who was a little braver than the rest, a tall streak of sour vinegar, turned and faced her companions. “I say stone her now. Before she can put a hex on the lot of us.”
Semple laughed nastily. “You’re all double-hexed already. You’ll have boils all over your bodies within the hour.”
She hoped this would put the fear into them. It seemed to work on some, who stopped glaring at her and began nervously peering inside the loose caftans, in search of latent blemishes. The tall woman, however, was not one of these. Semple had miscalculated. The threat only made her more determined. “How many times do I have to tell you? Stone the abomination, whatever it is!”
The tall woman appeared to possess a certain natural authority; after only a few seconds of hesitation, a majority of the others were bending down, reaching for rocks, pleased that someone was doing their thinking for them, and that the thinking involved direct and easy action. They started moving back, widening the circle so they wouldn’t hit each other when the boulders commenced to fly. This wasn’t going Semple’s way. Trying somehow to crack this reality, Semple looked around wildly, but she knew it was impossible. Dull, fearful, and brutish they might be, but there were too many women gathered in this place for her to erase them with her mind. They didn’t even need the sheep’s help to keep this bit of stinking desert intact. She didn’t want to believe she was going to be stoned back to the Great Double Helix by a bunch of primitive hick herdspersons, but it sure looked that way. If worse came to worst, was there any way to avoid the pain? She had to find an answer, and soon. The women were already winding up to throw. But then, miraculously, the cavalry charged to the rescue. There came an impossibly deep and booming voice: “AND WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE LORD IS GOING ON HERE?”