Jim shook his head. “Too much old-time religion at an early age can just eat some folks all up.”
Doc himself was also staring into the Valley of Gehenna that was now mercifully starting to retreat astern. “A little Bible is a dangerous thing.”
“Guilt and the need for punishment.”
Doc agreed with a sigh. “Fortunately neither you nor I, my friend, are burdened by either.”
No sooner had Doc spoken than three dark shapes detached themselves from a black-rusted wrought-iron pier that jutted out into the river at one point at the water’s edge. Doc frowned uneasily and gestured to Jim. “Now, what the hell do we have here?”
Jim squinted in the direction that Doc was pointing. “I don’t know, but I don’t like the look of them. I also don’t like it that they seem to be coming after us.”
Doc turned in his seat and reached under his coat. “Better open the throttle all the way, boy. I don’t like the look of this, either.”
Jim didn’t comment or argue. He just did as he was instructed. The Gun That Belonged to Elvis was in Doc’s right hand, and the older man was clearly not treating this as any joke, coincidence, or false alarm. Under the full power of its twin diesels, the launch surged ahead, but in the reaches of the Styx that flowed past Gehenna, the current was fast and not going their way. Jim glanced back. The slipstream that came with the increased speed whipped his hair across his face. He took a hand from the wheel and pushed it out of his eyes. The black shapes were gaining on them. Jim could now make out that their pursuers were small, hunched, ring-tailed gargoyles riding Jet Skis, two to each craft. Presumably the one in front was doing the driving, but the function of the passenger had yet to reveal itself. That revelation, however, wasn’t long in coming. The rear gargoyle riding the Jet Ski that was closest to them started swinging a steel grappling hook at the end of a long line. Clearly the intention was to intercept and board the launch. Jim, still holding the throttle wide open and zigzagging as best he could to make things hard for the gargoyle cowboy swinging the hook, glanced back at Doc. “What do those things want?”
“My guess is they’re recruiters looking for new meat for the mill.”
“I thought everyone was there by choice.”
“Supposedly, but I guess the locals aren’t above dragging in the odd unsuspecting and weary traveler for a little extra amusement. In these parts, nothing is written in stone.”
The gargoyle’s most recent cast had only missed the stern of the boat by a matter of a foot or so, and Jim spun the wheel so they looped and dipped across the full width of the river. “I’m sure as shit not going to Gehenna.”
“I’m with you there, kid. Hold her steady for a minute so I can do something about this.”
While Jim watched the river, and held the launch on as straight and steady a course as he could manage. Doc took careful aim with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis, but the boat was still bouncing enough to make shooting at a moving target highly problematic. Then Jim heard one explosion, followed immediately by a second and third. Jim looked back and the three Jet Skis had vanished. All that remained was some scattered flotsam and smoke on the water. Jim grinned. “You’re one motherfucker of a shot, Doc Holliday.”
Jim had expected Doc to look at least mildly pleased with himself, but the gunfighter’s face was troubled. “Normally I wouldn’t argue with you about that, but the truth is I never fired a single round.”
“What are saying? What happened to those things?”
“Something else blew them up. Something under the water. I had nothing to do with it.”
***
Aimee McPherson had not emerged from her locked and barred sanctuary for the equivalent of a full three days. After two more inexplicable fainting fits, she was convinced that her nuns and even some of the seraphim and angels were looking at her with increasingly less guarded speculation. She was certain they were secretly discussing whether or not their leader, Divine Mother, and virtual Godhead might be beginning to lose control of her powers and even her grasp on reality.
In the beginning it had been concern and anger over Semple’s refusal to communicate. Next had come the unexplainable intrusions: the cartoon rodents, the sea monster, and the UFO. After that, matters had turned inward, attacking her directly. First a growing pain in her stomach, and an increasing shortness of breath. These had been followed by headaches and double vision; finally there were the fits. The first attack had come out on the terrace, in the open, while walking with her nuns. She had staggered and reeled, hurting and disorientated, with agonizingly white light blazing in her head. The second of these fits, mercifully, had come in private with none of the nuns looking on. That time, the white light was replaced by a terrifying sense of drowning that had left her gasping for air like a goldfish that had flopped from its bowl.
The third had been the worst of all. She had been going over the daily records with three of the senior accounting nuns when she found herself in the grip of what she could only describe-and she wasn’t even accustomed to using such terms-as a violent, all-convulsing, grand mal orgasm. While the stunned nuns looked on, Aimee had jerked to her feet, tottered a few quivering steps, and fallen to her knees. She had then proceeded to roll on her back, twitching and contorting, mouth open, eyes screwed shut, pelvis arching upward, all the while gasping, snarling, screaming, calling on God and Jesus, talking in tongues, and finally repeating the two phrases, “Fuck me, you bastard! Fuck me until I die!” over and over like some unholy obscene mantra. After that she had passed out cold for an indeterminate time, only to awaken and find a gathering of a half dozen of the sisterhood making preparations for a full-scale exorcism.
Doing her best to cover her fear and confusion, she had jumped to her feet and attempted a stammering explanation that it had been nothing more than a spiritual visitation. The nuns clearly hadn’t believed a word of it and exchanged significant glances as she’d fled to the sanctuary of her private quarters, certain that what she had experienced was some ghastly print-through of her sister having sex. She should never have trusted Semple in the first place. Now she knew for sure that her sister was using the mission on which she’d been dispatched as an excuse to conduct some pornographic libertine’s grand tour.
Although the fits had been the worst of it, they were by no means the only signs that all was not well in her Heaven. It actually seemed as though the structure were starting to fall apart. Initially it had been only a matter of angels shedding the odd feather, or one or two bluebirds lying feet up, cartoon-dead on the terrace that overlooked the lake. Then two of the Scotch pines on the headland on the far side of the water had succumbed to some mysterious and uninvited tree disease and now stood leafless, sere and dead. The indigo of the water itself and the ultramarine of the sky faded at regular intervals to drab shades of somber gray. The wind seemed always to be blowing from Golgotha, making Heaven fetid with the reek of crucifixion. The once-immaculate grass that ran down to the edge of the lake was now patchy, unkempt. Dark unhealthy mold was growing on parts of the temple on the promontory; the diaphanous virgins had all but stopped dancing and spent most of their time on their hands and knees shooting craps.
The intrusions had also come back. After the UFO, there had been something of a lull as Aimee merely suffered. Then disturbingly abstract cloud formations started drifting across the once-idyllic vista; in the middle of one dour afternoon, a massed formation of black, 1930s-style, three-engined bombing planes, carrying sinister death’s-head insignia on their wings and fuselages, had growled overhead and disappeared beyond the same heliotrope ice-cream mountains whence the flying saucer had come.