Of course, while alive, he had resolutely disbelieved in the horror of the biblical Hell. Aside from being a stance that he couldn’t credibly take, it had always seemed too cruelly and logistically unsound. What possible purpose was there in torturing sinners for their minor human imperfections, their petty foibles and failures? The Hell of the fundamentalists seemed so irrationally all-consuming. Why was the kid who masturbated to his old man’s back issues of Playboy plunged into the same lake of burning lava as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or Vlad Tepes? And if one was to experience anything for a period as vast as eternity, surely one would eventually adapt? The lake of fire could hardly remain a punishment. After the initial shock, wouldn’t the nerve endings burn out and turn it into nothing more than an environment, and a pretty ridiculous environment at that? Jim’s philosophy toward Hell had been one part Descartes; one part Lost in Space. It didn’t compute, therefore it couldn’t be.
In common, though, with everyone else who had lived through the spiritual battering of a basic Judeo-Christian upbringing, the tiny voice from the unassailable infant compartment in his consciousness would remind him, whenever it got the chance, that Hell was real and Jim Morrison was damned to go there. Jim had thought that voice had been stilled forever after the night in Paris, in the old-fashioned bathtub with the claw-and-ball feet, in the slowly cooling water with the three grams of China white running chaotic and deadly wild in his bloodstream and the disposable syringe lying where he dropped it on the blue and white mosaic tile floor. Even amid the garbage dump that now passed for his memory, the first thought, when he’d discovered himself on the other side of the overdose, in a pod in the Great Double Helix, still remained bright, clear, and intact. The priest, Popes, prophets, and conservative politicians had got it all wrong. The Afterlife was a million times more psychedelically complex than the imaginings of Saint John the Divine. He’d been right and they’d been wrong. You could not petition the Lord with prayer. And yet, as he approached the gates of Hell, the voice was back and shrieking like a toddler deprived of its Ritalin:
“Told you so! Told you so!”
It had all seemed so clean and clear, so much more as it ought to be. Admittedly, he hadn’t up to this point, done anything too productive in the netherworld. His only excuse was that he had felt the right to a vacation after the shit he’d been through in the last few years of his life. Too many people had seemed bent on laying the hopes, fears, and psychoses of the 1960s squarely on his shoulders. Up until Charlie Manson and his riot girls had happened along, hadn’t he been the dark side personified? Sure, after he’d died, he’d ambled and rambled, fought with the hopeless Dionysians, and generally gone on drinking and carousing and losing his memory, maybe more than once, for all he knew. Was he supposed to have been scoring points of some kind instead of frittering away his time? Or was all that had happened since his death merely a sadistic prologue, a vicious lull before the full-blown shitstorm of God-fear could crash back on him as it apparently had when he read that legendary inscription. LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE! Now the small voice had grown so large it drowned out all other thoughts. Doc Holliday, Long Time Robert Moore, and all the others who had eased him down the path to perdition were nothing but a conspiracy of illusions. Abandon all hope, Jim Morrison, you’re en route to the unthinkable.
“Told you so! Told you so!”
The tide that was physically floating him to the unthinkable ran fast and straight, between arching walls of masonry like a set for The Phantom of the Opera. Had Jim not been so far gone, he might have noticed how his entering the Domain of the Damned through a replica of the Parisian sewer system wasn’t without a certain irony. For some reason, presumably to make turning back much more difficult, the River Styx had reversed its direction and was now flowing headlong to whatever awaited. Doc had even turned off the launch’s motor, allowing it to run free with the rapid current. The air in the tunnel smelled musty and ancient, almost like a tomb. He also thought he heard echoes of mass moaning, but it was too indistinct for a certain identification. When he thought he saw lights up ahead, he quickly looked to see how much whiskey remained in the bottle. A bare two inches. “Might as well meet the devil as drunk as a skunk.”
Jim attempted to finish what was left in one fell gulp, but managed only to choke on it. “Shit, can’t I do anything right.”
Doc, standing at the wheel, glanced around. “You know something?”
Jim angrily shook his head. “I’m definitely not talking to you.”
“Still believe I’m luring you into the pit of Hades?”
“Aren’t you?”
Doc coughed wetly and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Jim’s lip curled. “You’re not the tour guide and I’m going to have to see for myself?”
Doc’s expression turned bleak. “I’ll have you know, sir, you’re starting to try my patience.”
Jim hefted the bottle angrily. “You want to know how I feel right now?”
“You’d like to eat my children if I had any?”
“You’ve fucking got it.”
“In about two and half minutes, you’ll be begging my forgiveness.”
Up ahead, the light at the end of the tunnel was growing increasingly bright. Jim glanced at it, and then back at Doc. “You think so?”
Doc adjusted the wheel so the launch didn’t run into the green, algae-slick wall of the tunnel. “I know so.”
“You’re pretty fucking sure of yourself.”
Doc’s voice graveled out. “That’s why I’m the doctor.”
Jim had no answer to this. Doc thoughtfully scratched the back of his neck. “You remind me a lot of my old running buddy, Louie Celine.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Except you don’t appear to be the fascist type.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Of course, his long day’s journey ended with the night. You want to keep the party going well past dawn. To the end of the night, so to speak.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t think there’s time for an explanation.”
And indeed there wasn’t. Within moments, the launch slipped out of the tunnel into something that was not quite daylight, but Jim would have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the difference. Certainly the spectacle that presented itself was nothing like Jim had imagined. It had none of the trappings he’d visualized in his tunnel fugue of funk and fear. No burning lakes of crimson fire, no tortured souls, no horned demons. He had entered the tunnel expecting Gehenna to the fourteenth power and now he was leaving it with Doc laughing at him. “Here it is, boy, although what it really is we can never be too sure. Some say it is and some say it isn’t.”
“You’re telling me this is Hell?”
“That’s what the majority claim, although the majority, of course, have a vested interest in the tourist trade. Me, I never like to commit myself. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the place was fabricated.”
What the launch was now cruising into looked for all the world like a small port, possibly in the eastern Mediterranean, around the romantic end of the fifteenth century, the time of merchant princes and pirate kings. The light was a little weird, admittedly, coming as it did in great blue-tinged curtains of luminance through a series of fissures in a basalt ceiling too high and cloud-shrouded for clear observation. This one concession to the subterranean situation, however, didn’t seem to deter the large numbers of apparently untortured folk who made the docking area a bustling place of commerce and transit.