Moses turned and treated her to a searching stare. “Back in this place where you and your sister dwell, you’ve never been tempted to abuse your creations?”
Semple thought of Aimee’s Place of Skulls and her own torture chambers. She didn’t want to admit the existence of either to Moses, but to deny it would be pure hypocrisy. She decided to avoid the question. “When it’s a woman you’ve just had sex with that you’re sacrificing, it seems a little too like the way of the praying mantis.”
Moses assumed a superior smile. “With the mantis, it’s the female who kills after sex.”
The smile irritated Semple. “Okay, so how about ritual serial killing? Isn’t there a touch of the Norman Bates about it?”
“I don’t keep my mother in the root cellar. And besides, I don’t think poor Norman ever had sex with any of his victims.”
“He still killed them.”
“But I’m not killing these girls. Get real. They’re all dead already, aren’t they? We’re all dead already. At worst, I’m just sending them back to the Great Double Helix, and in that I could well be doing them a favor. Maybe after another spell in the pods, their choice of reality might be a little more intelligent. Ignorance may be the choice of the stupid, but if the stupid are ever capable of learning anything, it must surely be that ignorance is a steep path to climb, with nothing to break the fall and deadly sharp rocks at the bottom.”
“Very poetic.”
“It’s expected of me. It goes with the gig.”
“It’s a gig I know well. My sister and I helped write the book on twentieth century evangelism. It’s a damn shame we didn’t live long enough to get on TV. Could have made a fortune. Maybe even opened an amusement park.”
“Tell me more about yourself and your sister.”
Despite Moses’ assurances that he wasn’t about to do away with her, Semple remained wary. “We were once one and now we are two. What else do you need to know?”
“I recall that you said something about going to Necropolis on an errand for your sister.”
Semple looked thoughtfully at Moses. Up to this point, she’d had him pretty much pegged in the same paranoid megalomaniac bracket as Anubis. Maybe she would have to revise her first impression. This one at least paid attention and remembered. “Necropolis was only the starting point. Unfortunately, I became enmeshed in the dubious practices of Anubis that culminated in the business with the atom bomb.”
“And now you’re enmeshed with me?”
Semple pulled a swath of silk sheet around her nakedness. “Is that how you see it?”
“I’m not sure how I see it until I know more about this mission you were on for your sister.”
Semple held her gaze steady. Was Moses starting to reveal why he was keeping her alive and being implausibly pleasant? What imaginable thing could he think he might gain from her and Aimee? “It was an errand, not a mission.”
“Mission or errand, you seem a little reluctant to tell me about it.”
“Only because it’s a family matter and I know my sister doesn’t like the world to know her business.”
“Even people in that world who might be able to render her a positive service?”
Now Moses was looking straight into Semple’s eyes. She wished she could look away, but she knew it would be tantamount to giving him the game. “You believe you could render my sister a service?” She moved slightly so the silk sheet was stretched tightly across her breasts. “My sister Aimee is not in the least like me, you know? I’m what you might call the worldly one.”
“I have it on good authority that your sister needs help with the expansion of her Heaven.”
“Good authority?”
“There have been rumors.”
Semple cursed inwardly. “Rumors are not always good authority.” It had to be those damned nuns of Aimee’s. Semple always knew they couldn’t be trusted. “And even if my sister did need help to expand her Heaven, do you seriously believe you’re in a position to offer such help?”
Moses looked smug. “Perhaps.”
“And what form might this help take?”
Moses gestured to the desert beyond the confines of the tent. “I have a following, and certain powers of creation.”
For Semple, the conversation was taking a decidedly strange turn, but she did not want Moses to suspect her confusion. When Aimee had first come to her with her request for a poet, Semple had actually thought of him, before dismissing him as a prospect. The stories she’d heard about this supposed Moses in the wilderness had made him sound a little too unstable. Now, with a more intimate knowledge of him, she knew for a fact that he was demented, but if using Aimee as a bargaining chip helped extricate her from her current predicament, her gain would have to be Aimee’s loss. It was at that moment that a thought hit her. She had been cudgeling her brains as to what Moses might want with Aimee, and then suddenly the answer had presented itself. Her eyes opened wide and she grinned knowingly, full into Moses’ face. “You want Aimee’s Heaven as a Promised Land, don’t you?”
Later, when she told the story, Semple would freely admit that one of the things she had liked about Moses was, when his objectives were spotted or revealed, he didn’t bother to try to smokescreen his way out. Moses had grinned right back at her. “And that’s why I’m keeping you alive. So you can tell me where to find it.”
And Semple had her bargaining chip. Only it came with a new set of problems. The first and most pressing of these was, it didn’t free her from Moses and his crew. In fact, it bound her more tightly to them. The second was that, if the truth were told, and she prayed it never would be, she didn’t have a clue, after all the twisting and turning that she had gone through, how to get back to where Aimee waited with her wretched nuns and her equally wretched bluebirds.
***
The sky was now nothing more than a jagged, distant band of gray-blue, framed by the impossibly tall black glass cliffs. In this new stretch of the Great River, any semblance of similarity to life and Earth had been totally abandoned. The cliffs gleamed with a sinister sheen from the torrents and waterfalls that cascaded down them, and the razor edges on their acute, irregular angles looked sharp enough to cut a man’s flesh from his bones. The water the launch now traversed was a deep purple, whipped to a lighter magenta foam by the headlong speed of the current. Scattered flakes of burgundy snow swirled in a spiraling conflict of breezes, even though the chill in the air was still above freezing. Jim had little chance to observe these new surroundings, however. He had to spend all his time fighting the wheel to stay on course and avoiding the outcrops of dagger-like glass shards that projected through the surface of the roiling torrent, and Jim didn’t like it. In fact, he’d so had it with this stretch of river that his dislike boiled to a head when he had to wrestle the launch around to avoid tearing out a portion of the vessel’s side on one of the of jutting glass spear points. “This is getting dangerous.”
Doc lolled in the stern, unworried and unconcerned. “Don’t sweat it, Jimbo. We’ll be okay.”
“Are you for real, or just blithely self-destructive?”
“I’m telling you, nothing’s going to happen to us.”
“Why do I have the feeling you know something that you’re not telling me?”
“Maybe because you’re paranoid?”
“Or maybe because you’re not telling me something.”
Doc straightened in his seat and his eyes glinted with a first hint of warning. “Do I detect a touch of rancor in your tone?”
Maybe Jim was getting a little too used to Doc, and he certainly spoke without weighing the consequences. “Damn right you do. I’m sick of traveling blind up this goddamned river. I want to know exactly where we’re heading. Why does the destination have to be a fucking secret?”
“Like I told you earlier, I’m not the fucking tour guide. We’ll be there soon enough and you can see for yourself.”
“And what’s this tunnel you mentioned?”
“Like I said, you’ll see for yourself.”
Jim’s fury boiled over. “Fuck you, Doc Holliday!”
Doc laughed. “You’ve got a lot of balls when you get mad, young Morrison. There aren’t many who’ve stood as close as you are to me, with me armed and them not, and uttered the words, ‘Fuck you, Doc Holiday.’ ”
Jim took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m the one that’s blindly self-destructive.”
“What exactly has come over you, sport?”
Jim waved an all-encompassing arm at the river and its black glass cliffs. “Just fucking look at it. The farther we go up river, the worse it gets. The jungle was okay, but then there were the sandstone cliffs and the downed B-52 and all the other junk, then Gehenna, and now this. So what comes next, Doc? I’m feeling distinctly without a paddle. What are we sailing into now? Man-eating sharks? Giant squid? Or do we just plunge over Niagara Falls?”
Doc regarded Jim from behind an expression of blank neutrality. “This stretch leads directly to the tunnel.”
“So that’s the next surprise.”
“You’ll see the tunnel mouth in about five minutes or so.”
Jim could not resist pouting. “All time being relative?”
“The tunnel mouth can be quite a sight if you’ve never seen it before.”
Jim’s lip curled. “In five minutes?”
“Give or take.”
In fact, what Jim saw, and in considerably less than five minutes, was a cluster of slender towers like spindly bones that rose higher even than the glass cliffs. Jim looked quickly back at Doc. “I thought you said we were coming to a tunnel.”
“The mouth of the tunnel is cited as one of the wonders of the underworld.”
“It looks more like a fucking cathedral.”
“A fucking cathedral? Perhaps not the most appropriate simile. The entrance to the tunnel does tend to overwhelm and intimidate, though. It’s always reminded me of Gaudi’s Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, only on a much grander scale-”
Jim interrupted him. He hadn’t asked for a lecture and suspected that Doc was trying to screw him into the ground with pompous overinformation. “When were you ever in Barcelona?”
“It was one of my few hauntings. I was taken there by a freshly deceased Spanish anarchist. It was during their Civil War. He wanted to show me the communists fighting the anarchists and how a revolution could mindlessly tear itself apart.”
Jim would have continued the conversation, but a sudden buffeting of waves forced him to turn his attention back to the launch’s helm. He very quickly saw, however, that Doc was absolutely right. As more of the strange and imposing structure that housed the mouth of the tunnel was visible, it became evident that the resemblance to a cathedral was mainly the effect of the towers; holy had been replaced by an organically mutant distortion more akin to the work of movie monster maker Kurt Geiger. In its twists and turns of pillar, buttress, and crenellation, the tunnel mouth was unlike anything that Jim had ever seen, save perhaps in his human nightmares. And even those merely reptilian environments of Freudian horror were humble in comparison. The architecture that now confronted him seemed to draw on all the phobias of the bicameral mind.
Soon the fine details began to be revealed. Within the grand sweep of the structure lurked carvings from every conceivable myth and demonology. Screaming Incan feathered serpents jostled Notre Dame gargoyles for pride of place. Thunderbirds and dragons rampantly intertwined with banshees and monsters of the northern deeps. Ghouls and vampires formed ranks with night stalkers of the African veldt, chupacabra, and Chinese saber-toothed lions. And in the center of it all was a massive multiple inscription. Huge characters, letterforms, ideographs, and hieroglyphics had been carved in an area of smooth polished glass the size of a tennis court. Like some vast Rosetta stone, the same inscription was repeated over and over in more than a hundred languages, from Armenian to Zulu, with Latin, Swahili, and Basque at various points in between. Jim knew enough Spanish for that translation to send chills into him, but it was only when he found the English version, engraved in an elegant Roman serif face, that his blood truly turned cold.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER!
He turned to Doc with a scream. “You brought me here?”
“It’s hardly what you think it is.”
“You brought me here?”
“You’re operating under a serious misapprehension.”
“Did somebody pay you to do this, or was this your own whimsical idea?” Jim took his hands from the wheel. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not driving myself into your tunnel. If you want to play Charon the Shadow Boatman, you get up here and do it yourself.”
Jim let go of the helm, and the boat yawed out of control. Doc was on his feet, reaching for the wheel. “You have it all wrong, my friend. My only thought was, where better to raise figurative hell than in Hell itself?”