Doc shook his head. “These days, Hell has a nasty habit of shifting its geography when you’re least expecting it. The Virgils are among the few who can keep track of all the twists and inversions, and certainly the only ones plying for hire. Indeed, it’s how they make their humble nut in the underworld. It’s good to have one, at least until you get to the general area where you want to be.”
“So folks work for a living in Hell?”
Doc laughed. “Did you imagine Hell would be anything but a sink of terminal capitalism and wage slavery?”
As he spoke, he beckoned to one of the old men. “Ho, Virgil, attend us if you’d be so kind.”
The Virgil bowed and hurried toward them. Doc fished in his pouch and pulled out two of the plastic coins. He formally returned the Virgil’s bow and held out the coins. “Onorate l’altissimo poeta. Honor the greatest poet.”
The Virgil took the coins and pocketed them. “The poet accepts the honor and will lead you where you may.”
Doc nodded. “Then, like Orpheus, shall we start by descending?”
They were about to move to the head of the escalators when a commotion near the water caused them to pause. A craft, seemingly unusual for even the entrance to Hell, had appeared in the boat basin and the crowd on the wharves was pressing forward to gawk. A massive baroque submarine had surfaced, right beside the Mississippi paddle boat. The black iron monster had a definitely nineteenth century air about it, despite the fact that, in the nineteenth century, submarines were little more than a fantasy. Its cast Birmingham platework was decorated to the extreme, sporting fanciful scallops, rolling cornices, bas relief dolphins, and Neptune with his trident as a figurehead. A line of steel spikes along its dorsal ridge were also ornate, but looked as if they could rip the bottom out of most surface craft. Jim quickly glanced at Doc. “Could this be our benefactor from the river by Gehenna?”
“I fear it might be.”
“You fear?”
Doc nodded. “That’s what I said.”
Jim studied the craft. “It looks like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.”
Doc shook his head. “That’s not Nemo.”
As Doc spoke, a hatch in the conning tower opened and no less than the Voodoo Mystere Guede Docteur Piqures-Dr. Hypodermic himself-climbed out with the angular movements of a spider in evening dress. Doc took Jim and the Virgil urgently by the arm. “I think it would be a very good idea if we got out of here as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible.”
***
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Semple had been certain that the Beast, the one the whole damn tribe was screaming about, was at least going to be the Great Beast of Revelations, the mighty usher of the End Times, with the traditional seven heads, each with ten horns, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion, as biblically advertised. Instead, the massive figure that loomed over the horizon was something out of a whole other cultural ethos. How in creation had the great green, mountain-sized superstar and post-atomic Japanese monster movie icon found his way to this place of barren biblical hokum? Perhaps it was merely that, when you’re green and the size of a mountain, you can pretty much go where you want. Maybe the phrase “post-atomic” should have given Semple something of a clue, but right at that moment the analytical part of Semple’s mind was in temporary shutdown and she stood, mouth open with an expression the British describe as gobsmacked.
“Godz . . . !”
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
The ground shook repeatedly as the King of the Monsters advanced ponderously toward the faux Children of Israel. At first, it had only been possible to see his head and shoulders above the line of the horizon, but the rest of him came rapidly into sight, his potbelly, foundation legs, and finally his mighty four-toed feet, each of the latter kicking a dust storm with every impacted step, but nothing in comparison with the billowing clouds raised by the angry sweeps of his impossibly massive tail.
“Boy, do you look mad.”
Semple didn’t figure how or why, but somehow she knew instinctively, by some third, fourth, or even fifth sight, that to utter the King of the Monsters’ name in English could not only cause him extreme and maybe litigious vexation, but also create other malevolent resonances all over the Afterlife. That was why she had cut off her instinctive utterance in midsyllable. He looked angry enough already, with his eyes burning red and his feathery dorsal wattles erect and quivering. Semple quickly racked her brains for the acceptable Japanese nomenclature. Gojiro?
Wasn’t that what they called him?
The Tribe of Moses weren’t worrying what the advancing monster was called. They seemed to know that he was bad news by any name and immediately scattered in every direction, running for their lives. Men ran and women ran, sheep and goats stampeded, and camels made themselves scarce at a galloping thirty to forty knots. Only Semple remained where she was. Although Semple was far from sure if she was simply stunned or other more perverse forces were at work, her refusal to move made about as much sense as everyone else’s flight. It is virtually impossible for a human, or even a camel, fleet-footed from fear, to outrun a being with a stride of five hundred yards. As if to demonstrate the point, within another three stomping paces one great foot had crashed down, flattening some twenty of the faithful and a few dozen livestock. A second seismic stomp crushed twice as many humans as well as assorted sheep and goats. Leaning slightly forward, the mighty Gojiro now brought his tail into play and, with a resounding slap, sent a good twenty percent of Moses’ remaining followers wind-winging their involuntary way to the Great Double Helix.
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Semple had lost sight of Moses shortly after Gojiro had first appeared, and when she looked around she could see no sign of him. She was a little surprised that he had run with the rest. She imagined that he would have at least made a brief attempt to stand his ground and vibe down the living green mountain. The Patriarch had proved a chickenshit. This strip of stinking desert might be a tract of low-rent wilderness, but after all it was his very own self-created turf, wasn’t it? Unless, of course, she had been wrong all the way down the line. Now that she thought about it, she’d only been assuming. He’d never actually said how and why he and his people were there. For all she knew, Moses and his mob might be interlopers on the bad end of a netherworld reconstruct of Monster Island. As to why she was standing her own ground, Semple couldn’t quite say. She had no territorial imperative, and she certainly had no intention of vibing Gojiro down. Later, thinking back over her behavior, she could only remember a firm but irrational certainty that the megasaur intended her no harm.
Even in hindsight, this idea was hardly backed by the evidence. Gojiro clearly intended absolute harm to every human in the vicinity, and was bent on quite literally stamping them out. Even as Semple attempted to understand her lack of action, he was, to this very end, performing a quick flatfooted dance, a four-four combination with a hop-skip at the end and a whack with the tail on the off beat, and that was all anyone wrote for half of Moses’ followers. The accompanying earth tremors were Richter-scale-worthy. As the survivors became more widely scattered, Gojiro changed his tactics. He stopped dancing and began taking long, deliberate, hopscotch strides, like a child methodically killing a colony of ants. Every few steps he would pause to mop up small groups that had managed to elude his feet with a burst of incandescent electric-blue breath. Again Semple wondered what Moses and his crew could have done to so anger the King of the Monsters. If his movies were to be believed, he was rarely so vindictive with anything but high-tension power cables and Tokyo subway trains.
“GGGGAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!”
Except for a handful of the fleetest of foot, most of Moses’ tribe were now history. For all practical purposes, Semple stood alone. Gojiro had his back to her, busily uprooting a small clump of date palms in which one of the largest group of survivors had fruitlessly attempted to conceal itself. She seemed to be the only one in whom the Monster King had no apparent interest; could it be that some new reality distortion had come into being and he actually couldn’t see her? A swift blast of nuclear halitosis dispatched the last of the desperate fugitives among the ripped-up palms, and then Gojiro started to turn. He stared directly at where Semple was standing, and one look at the glint in his enormous red eyes collapsed her invisibility theory once and for all.