Rent boys strolled by, flaunting every style of allure from Axl Rose to Lord Alfred Douglas, including a number who might have amused Caligula. The women spanned an even greater bandwidth of fetish and fascination made flesh. In togas and bikinis and Marlene Dietrich tuxedos and the harnesses of harlots of the Marquis de Sade, they prowled and pouted and vied for the attention of the carriage trade. Hips swayed, asses posed pert, long legs stepped high, breasts made themselves known, while mouths and hands spoke the universal languages of allure and come-on. Perfumes piqued appetites, cosmetics enhanced and enticed, and nudity reduced matters to essential basics. For those with more cultured and jaded tastes, lace partially concealed, silks whispered down the twilight places of memory, and polished leather and burnished chrome promised precise brutalities. Over and above the women and boys, the androgynes, the hermaphrodites, and the totally unidentifiable made their unique and peculiar pitches. Jim wondered and frankly stared at the circling parade with all the awe of a yokel. He was astonished that so much temptation could be crowded into just one geographical space, and at how all of it could be consummated by the hour in the hot-sheet hotels that ringed the concourse behind electric signs over darkly modest doorways.
“This is definitely what I’ve been missing.”
An Oriental woman in saffron latex and rhinestones with straight black hair that reached well below her waist smiled at him. A painted and powdered young man with blond curls like an epicene Harpo Marx eyed the crotch of Jim’s leathers and ran his tongue slowly over his upper lip. An older woman paused en route to the up escalators to give Jim an appraising inspection, as though she believed that he might be one of the ones available for sale. A mugwump vibrated its multiple udders at him and each one became tipped with a tiny telltale pearl of milky fluid. Belly dancers writhed, double-jointed mutations demonstrated lewd flexibilities, and a tall Valkyrie with a spiked copper brassiere, buckled-on broadsword, and a thick Teutonic accent whispered huskily to Jim as she passed, “Mine namen ist Zena and you look so good to me I’d fuck you twice for free.”
The words were delivered as a poorly scanned rhyming couplet; Jim was tempted to follow and investigate the reality of the offer. The Virgil must have overheard, though, and he shook his head at Jim. “It would be counterproductive to pause for pleasure at this early a juncture, young sir. I can assure you the offers that will come deeper in the labyrinth will be at the very least equal to any you’d find here.”
Jim was momentarily disappointed to be hurried past such a welter of delight, but he soon realized that the Virgil was only reiterating Smokey Robinson’s adage about the advisability of shopping around. He was aware that, even though Dr. Hypodermic might be on his trail, he was actually starting to feel good. He was back in the rough-and-tumble trade of imperfect humanity, and that in itself was starting to make him feel more human. He was also reaping the psychological benefit of being desired by something other than an alien simulation. It didn’t matter whether that desire was based on his good looks or his new bag of plastic gold. He hadn’t been desired since the Moses orgy, and at that ill-fated gathering desire had been a highly debased coinage. This was not to say that desire was any more pure and genuine in the concourse of Hell, but at least it wasn’t so mindlessly drugged, and it certainly made him feel once again a part of the great erotic dance of humanity. He straightened his shoulders, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and began to walk with a new spring in his slouch, letting himself be admired by any who cared to.
He turned to Doc to gloat about his newfound attitude, only to discover the gunfighter deep in conversation with the Virgil on how this present Hell had come to be, more taken by the old poet’s theorizing than the imperious beckoning of an importunate kitten-with-a-whip who had taken a shine to him.
“So you’re saying that Hell really succumbed to its own essential paradox?”
The Virgil glanced briefly at the sex kitten and then nodded. “If it was designed to be the ultimate in infinite horror and suffering, what was there left with which to threaten those already incarcerated within? It ultimately failed from the illogic of its dynamic.”
“So after ten thousand years they gave up and turned it into a tourist attraction, altissimo poeta?”
The Virgil smiled as if he considered Doc an apt pupil, though he may have just been looking to enlarge his tip by some applied flattery. “It’s certainly a very plausible way of looking at what has come to pass. Those of us who have made our homes here find that it’s better to regard Hell as an entity rather than a place. That which cannot adapt must surely perish.”
Jim caught on to the end of the discussion. “So Hell, just like everything else, is subject to entropy?”
As he spoke, Jim caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks. Even among the wide diversity of the women who thronged the concourse, this one was strange. Not human, but certainly not anything else. She was more like a comic book character, brought up from the printed page in gleaming scarlet and somehow rendered three-dimensional. To make matters even less believable, she seemed to be floating about a foot or so above the ground, oddly insubstantial, more like a hologram or a ghost than a solid form. This wasn’t the full extent of Jim’s shock, however. Though her face and figure had undergone considerable graphic alteration, he instantly recognized the image on whom the strange figure was based. He let out an amazed gasp. “Semple McPherson.”
As Jim gasped, Doc looked around. “What?”
And, in the moment that Doc turned, the figure vanished.
Jim was at a loss. “She was right here . . . ”
“Where?”
“She was right here, but now she’s gone.”
“I think you’d be well advised to get that lady off your mind, my boy. At least for the moment.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about her. She just appeared out of nowhere and then vanished again.”
The Virgil attempted to communicate his own lack of concern to Jim. “Many apparitions come and go in this place. They should be no cause for either concern or speculation. It is gone now and will not return.”
Jim’s face was set. “No disrespect, altissimo poeta. But I think I’ll be seeing this one again. Doc and I already had one sneak peek at the future and she was right there, in a starring role.”
***
Clearly the mind of the King of the Monsters was so underemployed that it could accommodate guests, strangers, even those who were some part of both. Apparently some had even gone so far as to set up their own virtual world in between the system tracks of the big beast’s consciousness. One thing Semple didn’t understand was why the vista in front of her looked as much like Japanese anime as she did. She knew Gojiro was an icon of the Setting Sun, but she wasn’t certain that was the full explanation. All she knew was that she had to venture into this new land, unless she intended to hide in Gojiro’s eye forever, and she could only hope she would learn more about it as she went. Her first step through the door and into this strange, hand-drawn world had been an unfortunate one. A glitch in reality of some kind had occurred in the instant that she crossed the threshold. She had briefly experienced a sudden falling sensation. A momentary chasm of open-air vertigo had yawned beneath her, causing a stomach-wrenching illusion of being in two worlds at once. Part of her was entering the cartoon world that lay beyond the door, but some other sector of her perception was in an echoing place of blue light and moving figures, a huge ballroom filled with insinuating whispers between the throbs of powerful machinery. For the nanosecond she existed in this blue world, a young man in black leather pants and a white shirt, with curly dark hair and intense eyes, had stared at her in amazement; in the same instant, she knew that he was the one from that strange erotic experience all that subjective time ago in the bed of Anubis.