Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife: A Novel by Mick Farren

Author:Mick Farren
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Eschatology, Fantasy, Aimee Semple, Jim, Fiction, Religion, Holliday, John Henry, McPherson, General, Morrison
ISBN: 9780312206543
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1999-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

His first sight of Gehenna was enough to make Jim wish that he was drunk again. Even before visual contact, the stench that wafted down the river, the stink of punishment and pain, of violated bodies, ozone, sulfuric acid and ammonia, hot blood and decaying flesh, burning hair and unidentifiable toxic pollution, was an olfactory cocktail that boded the worst kind of ill. With it came an amalgam of noise that was equally daunting: massed voices cried and lamented in a seamless howl of screams, shouting, and psychotic laughter. The human wailing was accompanied by a counterpoint of growls and barking that had to come from the throats of things so evil they could hardly qualify as animal. Underpinning it all was the deep rumble and straining grind of unholy massed machinery. And yet the sound and smell were only mild precursors of the full visual spectacle. Hieronymous Bosch was made real with a brutality that leapt quantum measures beyond any mere painting’s imagined nastiness. Those who dwelled there had come to suffer in a manner unimaginable even to one with Jim’s deviant background.

In a massive, smoke-filled crevasse carved out of the living sandstone like an axe wound in the rock made by some god or spectacular giant, creaking and straining mechanisms of suffering labored at their infinitely repeated tasks. While flames belched from fissures in the rocks, pistons rose and fell and steam leaked from huge driving engines. Revolving cam shafts and greased axles turned cogs of wood and brass and long spiral worm gears that, in their turn, caused lacerating steel blades to rise and fall and huge hammers to drive iron nails into writhing flesh. Countless victims were bound, strapped, and secured to gallows, gibbets, and structures so bizarre in the contortions they inflicted on the human frame that Jim was unable to give names to them. Long, slow-rolling conveyor belts moved the damned from one automated theater of cruelty to the next, in endless cycles of relentless automation. Huge cauldrons steamed and bubbled at a slow simmer, each filled to the brim with a foul stew on the surface of which bobbed the shrieking, sobbing heads of submerged humans. Others were crushed, over and over, by huge stone rollers, while more were continuously flogged with lashes as long as the leather traces of teamster wagons.

Although the mechanical structures presented the impression that Gehenna was a dark clockwork universe of meaningless repeating torture, it had no real precision about it. Its mechanisms strained and shuddered; elbows in its maze of pipework leaked steam and dripped boiling water and oil. Its nooks and crannies were thronged with masses of wailing humanity being subjected to less systemized acts of fiendishness. Jim watched while what was left of a man, flesh all but stripped from his bones, was dragged along a dripping, reeking catwalk over one of the cauldrons. A barbed fishhook pierced his rib cage, and the rope attached to the hook was dragged behind a blood-spattered golf cart being driven by a pair of grinning demons.

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