“No.”
Yog?
“No.”
Revenge of the Creature?
“No.”
Alien Contamination?
Jesus shook his head.
Flying Disc Men from Mars?
“No.”
At Death Race 2000, Jesus hesitated. For a moment he seemed tempted, but then he changed his mind. “Maybe not.”
Panther Girl of the Congo?
“Definitely not.”
“Listen-”
Jesus seemed unaware that Semple hardly shared his enthusiasm for locating the perfect ambient movie moment, and was oblivious to her growing irritation. “Try a different combination; we seem to be locked in some psychotronic sector.”
Semple held out the remote. “Why don’t you try? I’m clearly hopeless at this.”
Jesus took the remote. With a swift and skillful dexterity, he entered a long combination of keystrokes. The screen flashed and there was a grainy black and white Irving Klaw one-reeler of the great Betty Page, near-naked in stockings and shoes, with manacles on her wrists. What was unusual, and had Semple riveted, was that this particular one-reeler also had a man in the frame. In fact, Betty was on her knees giving him enthusiastic head, cupping his balls with her chained hands, while he reclined on a couch strangely like the one right there in the dome. Semple had been certain that Betty, whom she once met briefly in Florida, had never in her life done hardcore. It had to be a morphed simulation of some kind. Semple glanced quickly at Jesus. “If it was vintage porno you wanted . . . ” Then she stopped in midsentence. “Wait a minute.”
The camera had panned up to the ecstatic face of the man, and she instantly recognized him. It was that same long-haired young man again, the one who had featured in her orgasm vision with Anubis, and again during the strange brief flash while stepping into the anime world. Who the hell was he, and what did he want? She turned to see if she might get this or maybe some other answers out of Jesus, but she found that Jesus was gone. He was still nude, and still standing there as a physical entity, but his mind was somewhere up there on the screen with Betty and her mysterious paramour.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
Although it coincided with Semple’s question, Jesus’s gesture was in no way a reply. He made a slow pass with his right hand. The lights dimmed and the volume of the moaning, gasping audio rose. He started to move backward toward the couch, never once taking his eyes off the images on the screen. Semple’s irritation escalated to anger. “Can you hear a damned word I’m saying?”
Without looking away from the screen, Jesus sank into the couch, pulled his legs up, and slowly curled into a fetal positon. Then, as though motivated from deep within a dream, he began to masturbate. Semple was outraged. “This is getting absurd.”
A Welsh accent came from the other side of the room as Mr. Thomas looked up from the packing case he had all but demolished. “Did you know that goats discovered coffee?”
***
A white tuxedo and a clean dress shirt over his trademark leather jeans and boots, a black bow tie hanging unknotted around his neck, a scotch on the rocks in one hand, and a cigarette in the other; Jim felt ready for anything. He was cleaned, shaved, modestly cologned, and now leaned against the bar and surveyed the salon privee and decided that, maybe, with a couple more scotches inside him, he might actually be ready to face down Dr. Hypodermic and whatever that entity might have in store for him. When it came to gambling in Hell, Doc Holliday had to be given full credit for finding his way to the glittering diamond heart of the matter. The salon prieee was clearly an anthology of the best of every belle epoch in classic high rolling. A Sean Connery–era James Bond commanded the baccarat shoe and seemed to be winning with heroic consistency, while, facing him across the table, an overfed epicure in a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, who greatly resembled Orson Welles, chain-smoked Cuban Perfectos and looked exceedingly unhappy about the situation. As they’d entered the large, ornately furnished room, Doc had whispered discreetly to Jim, “That could well be Le Chiffre sitting over there. Or a ringer, who’ll do, for all practical purposes. I’d seriously advise against doing anything to ruffle or disoblige him. In fact, it would probably be a good idea if you didn’t even bring yourself to his attention.”
“Watch out for the carpet beater?”
“You’ve got the right idea.”
At another table, four Regency bucks played hazard. They were going heavy on the port and the claret and their brittle badinage was growing a little slurred, and Jim noticed that two of them were probably well on their way to taking it to the terrace. In contrast, the five Fu Manchu mandarins playing fan-tan at a nearby table did so in absolute silence, letting the click of the tiles do their talking for them, with a nuance of clack that could vary from smug to angry.
When Doc had pointed out the lights at the end of what Jim now thought of as the Sewer of Suicides, he had expected just a single casino, some kind of smoky western-movie gambling den with hunched degenerates losing the price of their souls to dealers in striped vests and eyeshades, while hostesses in fishnets hustled blow jobs and red-eye to the unshaven, whiskey-breath carriage trade. Jim quickly discovered he had set his sights mournfully low. Instead of a lone gambling joint, he found himself walking down an entire plaza of well-appointed casinos, fascias hewn from the living rock, much in the manner of the desert city of Petra, each with its own complex riot of animated neon. The lights he’d seen up ahead weren’t just from a single source but from a diffusion of many. What confronted Jim when the tunnel opened out was a complete subterranean strip: Vegas, Reno, or Monte Carlo consigned to the rocky bowels of the hereafter. In some respects it could almost be viewed as a refinement of a much older concept of Hell. Instead of lakes of fire and brimstone, souls could find themselves doomed to draw to an inside straight through all eternity, not unlike the sex-locked denizens of the elevator concourse. Not that Jim was thinking this way when the Sewer of Suicides first opened out onto this cavernous boulevard of honky-tonk angels, five-card stud, and broken dreams. He just looked around in surprise and bad-boy delight. “This is really fucking something.”
The Virgil had looked at him with a hint of reproach in his expression. “Did you really think I’d steer you to some funky clip joint, my young master?”
Jim had half expected Doc to go straight into the first establishment in line, which went by the name the Atomico and sported an elaborate nuclear explosion in garish red-orange and yellow as its electrical come-on. Jim had even started to move toward the entrance before Doc had shaken his head. “Not that one, my boy. I have a reputation to maintain.”
“Isn’t one casino much like another?”
“To a drinker, maybe, but certainly not to a gambler. All this tourist mill has to offer is slots, Wayne Newton music, and seven-deck blackjack to discourage the counters. Not that anyone who goes in there is going to be able to count beyond the sum total of their fingers and toes.”
As if in practical confirmation of Doc’s summation of the Atomico, a squad of casino security, in silver radiation suit uniforms, forcibly ejected three sweating, Day-Glo-pink, very drunk pigmen. The pigmen, hominids but hairless, with snouts, curly tails, and perky little ears, existed in some numbers throughout the length and breadth of the Afterlife. No one really knew where the pigmen originated or for what purpose they had been designed, but some humans claimed that they were the leavings of an unholy Cold War genetic experiment. Others simply theorized that they were kept around to make everyone else look good.
Doc also declined to enter Glitter Gulch, the Alhambra, the Shalimar Sporting Club, the Four Aces, and the inevitable Flamingo and Golden Nugget. He was setting a course for the far end of the street, where a magnificent flight of steps led to what could only be Hell’s grand casino. So grand, in fact, that it didn’t even need to display its name. Where the others were purely gaudy, this last place made its point with dignity and fine architecture. Flames danced from cressets flanking the stairs, and the porticoed entrance was guarded by men dressed in the uniform of Napoleonic lancers. As they drew nearer, Doc nodded approvingly. “That’s the place we need, my friend. I’ve always found money flows cleaner and more smoothly in surroundings of quiet elegance than amid gaudy trash.”