Katabasis — Chapter no 21

Chapter Twenty-One

Peter did not speak for a long time after she finished. She was grateful that he didn’t; she would have wilted had he launched into any of the standard responses. I’m so sorry, why didn’t you tell me, I’m horrified that happened to you. Peter did not try to make it better. All he did was witness.

At some point he’d taken her hand. His thumb rubbed again and again over the crevices between her knuckles. An automatic impulse, Alice knew; he could never sit still, he needed something to fiddle with. If it weren’t her hand it would have been a stick of chalk. Still it was the most comforting touch she’d felt in months.

They weren’t back to where they’d started. But it seemed, for the first time since she could remember, that they could be honest with one another.

At last Peter said, “But you were so sure.”

“About what?”

“That he wasn’t in Desire.”

“Desire is for lovers,” said Alice. “That wasn’t love.”

Peter considered this, and then nodded. “So what was your solution?”

“To what?”

“How you would have gotten Professor Grimes out of here alive.” He let go of her hand. “You saw my plan. What was yours?”

Might as well, Alice thought. She dragged her rucksack toward her.

“I’m not sure I had one.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I kept telling myself I was here to get him back.” She fished out her notebook. The binding was waterlogged, as were the edges, but the pages still dry and legible. “But you know what? I never really cracked it. I kept telling myself—time’s ticking, you’ve just got to go, you’ll figure the rest out on the way. But this was all I came up with, and I’m not even sure it would work.”

She flipped to the very end of her notebook, to the last things she’d written down before she drew the pentagram to Hell. “Two weeks ago I found the syllabary of the Thessalian witch Erichtho.”

“Eric-who?”

“Erichtho.”

“Never heard of her.”

“You wouldn’t have. She’s tricky, Erichtho. Always lingering on the margins, never in the main archives. It seems to me she was a fairly accomplished magician, only everyone in her time found her arts too freakish and frightful to document properly. I never would have heard of her at all, except I—well, by the time we got over here, I’d started digging into some pretty odd stuff.”

She flipped backward in her notebook. “You see, I started with Dante.

Virgil cites Erichtho as the one who bade him journey into Lower Hell and report back to her all that he found. And from Dante I got over to Virgil, and from Virgil I got into acrostics. And I learned about these ruins, see, called the Colossi of Memnon. They’re these two colossal statues in Thebes built to guard the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, but they’ve been associated with the Trojan king Memnon since antiquity. For thousands of years, every morning at dawn, these statues have emitted a high-pitched cry. We don’t know what causes it. Maybe it’s the heat of the sun expanding the rocks so the wind hits them at just the right angle. But it’s believed the sound is the dying Memnon crying out to his mother, Eos, the goddess of dawn. And I started wondering whether the Colossi of Memnon held some chalk inscription that allows communication from the underworld.”

She wasn’t sure her ramblings made any sense—it was all a jumble of associated concepts flung together from days of frenzied research—but Peter nodded patiently. “And what did you find?”

“Acrostics, mostly. I couldn’t very well drop everything and go to Egypt, but I did find all these photographs hidden in some personal collections, and I found all these Greek and Latin inscriptions that visitors over the years had left on the statues. Proskynemata. Religious writings.

They were all lightly encrypted, and they all made use of basic acrostics magick. Small spells to send messages to their loved ones or to wish their loved ones peace in death, I don’t know. But I did see that one name kept coming up over and over again. Erichtho.”

“This is a fantastic rabbit hole,” said Peter.

“Quite.” Alice laughed sharply. “I know, I’m sorry. But you know how when you’re running yourself ragged on a research project and nothing

sticks and then you find that one thing that holds promise? Like it’s glowing, calling out to you? Like a single star in a dark sky?”

Peter nodded. “It’s a lifeline.”

“Right. You cling to it with everything you’ve got. Because there’s nothing else.”

Erichtho was the only name that held significance for Alice those days, the only hope of an answer. She would wake up from unwilling sleep with the dreadful task of Orpheus before her, and amidst the gray dead ends of all the scholarship in centuries past only Erichtho gleamed like Ariadne’s string, leading somewhere unknown—but at least somewhere.

“So then I went searching in the Greek archives. It took forever to track down any manuscripts of hers, as they weren’t even classified in the magick library, but finally I found some old scraps of papyrus that are carbon-dated to Thessaly. And then I sat with those for a while, and I realized Erichtho was playing around with the same divergent series that modern Tartarologists were obsessed with. And that it’s possible, back centuries ago, that Erichtho arrived separately at the same thing we’d call—”

“Ramanujan’s Summation,” said Peter.

“Precisely. The same mechanism that let us come to Hell in the first place.” Alice turned the page and tapped a drawing of a pentagram, one very similar to the one that had sent them to Hell; only two crucial names were placed elsewhere. “So there’s my solution. But instead of sending a physical object to new coordinates, I would have bound a soul to separate coordinates and brought it back to earth.”

“I don’t follow,” said Peter.

Alice hesitated. It all seemed too horrible to say out loud, so she opted for the classic magician’s approach, which was to phrase everything in the clinical terms of a journal abstract. “In Dante’s Inferno, Erichtho is passingly mentioned as the one other person who has sent Virgil into the depths of Hell. Scholars are divided on what Dante was trying to accomplish with this mention. Some think it’s to reassure the reader that Virgil knows his way around Lower Hell; others think it’s to emphasize Virgil’s paganism by associating him with witchcraft.

“Either way, here Dante is drawing from a more elaborate anecdote in Lucan’s Pharsalia, in which the Thessalian witch Erichtho is asked by the Roman general Sextus Pompey to divine the outcome of the Battle of Pharsalus. And she does.” She hugged her arms around her chest. “She

drags a corpse off the battlefield and forces its soul to return to its mangled body, to deliver to Sextus a prophecy. It is a horrible spell. The soul is not living nor dead; he speaks through his former body, but only with great effort. He cannot live life as he used to; but neither can he die, for his soul is trapped. Eventually Erichtho frees his soul by burning his body on a pyre.”

Peter said nothing. If he knew where this was all going, he didn’t show it; he only kept watching her, inscrutable.

“And that’s what I would have done to Grimes.” Alice’s arms tightened around her chest, like a closing trap, like she could squeeze herself into nothing if she tried hard enough. “I would have put him back in that corpse.

I would have filled it with all sorts of unnatural shit to keep it together, and kept the spell going long enough that the mechanics of his vocal cords and tongue could move, could say all the things I needed it to say. I would have kept it at my complete mercy. I wouldn’t have given Grimes a second life at all. I would have made him into my toy and pet and made him beg for release.”

Peter remained ever polite, curious. “And how would you have done that?”

“Oh, all the witchy things. The froth of slain mad dogs. Lynx’s entrails.

Sea leeches. All the monstrous things of nature. Lucan is very descriptive.”

“Oh my.”

Alice cleared her throat. “And also I dug him up.”

“There it is.”

“There wasn’t much to dig up, anyways.”

“I’m sure.”

“But see, it works because you’re not trying to bring the soul back,”

Alice said. The rest she said as quickly as she could; robotic, just reading out the summary. “You can dispense with the cosmological problems of life and death and reanimation and all that, because this version of Grimes doesn’t get to interact with the living anymore. He wouldn’t be properly alive. He’d just be a voice. An imprint. He’d be mine. All mine. My thing.

Mine to play with, or experiment on, or interrogate, or even—just—Lock him in a closet, and forget about him for years.”

Well, there it was. She loosed a breath, lifted her chin, and awaited judgment.

“I see.” Peter tilted his head. “That’s—hm. Fascinating.”

“You think it’s sick.”

“No, I think . . .” He blinked at the pages, considering. “I think this is very impressive research, considering. Your creativity is astonishing.”

“Oh, well. Thanks.”

“How long would you have kept him alive?”

“I didn’t really think that part through either.”

Indeed there were many parts of her plan she had not thought through.

How to explain a reanimated corpse to the rest of the department. How to keep Grimes from screaming for help. How to convince a dissertation committee that the hoarsely blathering pile of rotted flesh and bones was in fact the soul of Professor Jacob Grimes speaking, and not a paid undergraduate hiding beneath the floorboards.

Well, she supposed it was obvious why not. She could convince herself all she wanted that this was a rescue. But it had never been about the recommendation letters. It was only about revenge, and bloody control, and having Grimes understand at last how it felt to be someone else’s toy. It was only a fever dream. And Peter was too smart to for a second believe otherwise.

“Though I don’t think it would make me feel better.” Alice drew her knees up to her chest. “That’s the problem. I hoped it might—but the more I think about it, the more I realize, I only want this because it’s what he would have done. It is such a perfectly Grimes solution, you know. Brutal, efficient, shocking. He never went halfway, he only ever went through. And some part of me, deep down, is actually excited. Because I keep imagining him waking up to see what I’ve done.” She gave a helpless laugh. “And I keep fantasizing he might actually look around and tell me good job.”

“You know,” said Peter, “I do think he would.”

“He’s stamped on our minds,” said Alice.

“Oh, yes.” Peter cast her a sad sideways smile. “Can’t get him out.”

They both stared down at the notebook.

Alice had not revisited these pages since she scribbled her notes. She was amazed now by the sight of her own handwriting, a frenzied scrawl that looked nothing like her usual neat script. She remembered those final hours of research, sitting hunched over Erichtho’s writing beside a dim and buzzing lamp, forcing her hand to keep up with her racing thoughts. At points she had pressed so hard against the page that the lead broke, leaving

charcoal smudges. Peter’s notebook looked tame by comparison. Her own looked like the work of a lunatic.

In a small voice she asked, “So you don’t think I’m mad?”

Peter reached out; his fingers wrapped around hers.

And although all they did was sit, silent, and although still they had no solution and no way out, somehow Alice felt more clearheaded than she’d been in a very long time. She felt still, her thoughts settled. As if she had been flailing through the air, flapping and choking, and here at last someone had granted her a place to land.

TIME SLIPPED FORWARD. THE SKULL CONTINUED to cuckoo. At first Alice kept checking her watch, but soon she stopped bothering. Minutes, hours, it did not matter. They had no way out.

The Kripkes had not come. This gave Alice some small twinge of hope —that perhaps the Kripkes had forgotten about them, that perhaps instead of a terrible bloody death they would only die a stifled, quiet one. The Kripkes were in no hurry. They didn’t need to grapple with two adults. They only needed to wait them out. And the Kripkes had all the time in the world.

She considered weeping about it, but it was too hot and dry; at this point she didn’t have the moisture in her body to condense into tears.

Was this the end, then? She took stock of her life, all her dreams and efforts and desperate aspirations, and could not feel anything other than a pathetic amusement at where she had ended up.

She’d taken a class on Greek philosophers during her first year of college, before she discovered she was allergic to philosophy. She didn’t care much for Socrates, but she did like the way Aristotle wrote about the world, the soul, the form of living creatures. He had such faith in their drive to flourish. And she remembered reading Aristotle’s argument about how any living being, even the most primitive organism, was animated by an idea of the good. Even the plant turned its face toward the sun. Even the tiniest ant sought food; the brainless worm sought soil. It was all so easy for living creatures—all except people, except people like her, who had a knack for seeking only that which made them miserable.

All her life, it seemed, she had run headfirst in precisely the wrong directions. It was not for lack of opportunity. She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

Or perhaps people like Alice were just fundamentally broken. Perhaps they were wasted on life; perhaps dying was the best thing for her. Perhaps she was less like Aristotle’s plant and more like Freud’s organisms, who were driven compulsively toward death, toward the tranquil, inanimate state of things before they had the misfortune of being born. She voiced this theory to Peter.

“Hm,” he said. “I don’t think we compulsively seek death.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I just think we got tangled up. But we’re still trying to face the light.”

They chatted for a bit. Mindless memories, bland observations. Meals they’d once had. Books they’d once read. Once or twice Alice made Peter laugh, and that seemed the greatest victory she could accomplish in the moment; that she could still elicit his hiccupping laughter.

Their voices grew hoarse, their tongues dry, their voices soft. At last they lapsed into silence.

Alice supposed there were worse ways to die. At least she knew she had nothing to be afraid of. At least she was not dying alone.

And she could not deny the part of her that was relieved at the fact that finally it was all out of her hands; that there was no longer any point to the scheming and spell casting and struggling. At last there was a punctuation mark to it all, and she had no control over it. This was a comfort.

“Alice.” Peter nudged her shoulder. “Alice?”

She blinked awake. “Yes?”

“I’ve been lying to you.”

“No you haven’t,” she mumbled. “Don’t say that.”

“The equation you found.” He sat up straight. “You were right. It wasn’t just my playing around. It is, in fact, my dominant strategy to get Professor Grimes out of Hell.”

“Oh, we were having such a good moment.” Alice let her arm fall limp against his. This confession did not bother her as much anymore—now that they were going to die, knowing Peter would have killed her had he gotten his way was disappointing, but not a surprise. “Please don’t ruin it.”

“You don’t understand,” said Peter. “I wasn’t going to trade you. I never would have traded you. I was going to trade myself.”

“But you can’t,” said Alice. “Axiom of . . . you can’t. I tried.”

“Well, no,” said Peter, “I would have asked you to do it for me.”

It was so hot, Alice thought. So damn hot. She couldn’t tell if the buzzing came from without or within. But she could let her mind slide, and think only about the buzzing, and not about the implications. Oh, sweet blankness; the absence of thought. She should have been born a rock. She considered acting like one; playing deaf, just letting Peter’s words slide off her like water.

But he looked so very distressed. He was clearly not going to let this one go.

She pulled together the energy to ask, “Why?”

“Well, because I killed him.” Peter’s face worked terribly. “I mean, his death is my fault. Not yours. So it stands to reason I should bring him back.”

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