Katabasis — Chapter no 25

Chapter Twenty-Five

Alice flew into a frenzy outside the trap. She tried everything. She scrabbled around the sand, flinging it up in great fistfuls, just in case anything she touched disturbed the hidden pentagram. She drew every spell she could think of. She dug a knife into her fingertips and soaked the ground with great dribbles of blood, white dust glowing red. It didn’t matter. Her chalk faded into the sand. She screamed to Peter, begging him to try the spell again, to come out and join her. The trap held firm. If he heard her shrieks, she couldn’t know.

She fled when she heard skittering on the horizon. She had half a mind to stay rooted where she was, to plop herself on the ground and let the Kripkes take her too. That would be the easiest thing to do. But Peter’s wide, plaintive eyes were burned into her mind. To die then, after his sacrifice, would be spitting on his corpse. So she snatched up the rucksack and ran as fast as she could, choking back her cries.

She needn’t have bothered. The Kripkes paid her no heed. Several moments later the skittering ceased, and a victorious howl echoed over the sands. Alice paused, horribly compelled to turn around. She saw them stalking in a straight line across the sand. She could not see their faces clearly from where she stood: only their frames, two large figures and a smaller one. Like Elspeth they dressed head to toe in armor, but where hers was of chain-link debris, theirs was of white bone. Sharp fangs arced past their jaws. Something else’s ribs caged their torsos. Bulbous round things hung at all their waists, bobbing at they moved. Pouches for blood, Elspeth had told her. They made them with bladders.

The little procession paused before the boulders. The two older Kripkes bent over, incantating over their spell. A ripple formed in the sand. One by one they disappeared inside. Alice heard a sharp, grating noise. Metal screeching. She heard Peter scream.

She screamed too through her balled-up fingers, fists shoved in her mouth to muffle her sounds. She sank to her knees, shoulders convulsing.

The pressure was terrible. She thought she would split apart. But the only

thing more terrible than the feeling itself was that obliteration didn’t come, that she kept on hurting. She had never felt anything so sharp. Before she had only thought this grief theoretical, a grief that exceeded what words could describe. The only thing that came close was the Classical Chinese phrase “ ,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.

She wished it were her they were bleeding and gutting in there. She’d have given anything to change places. She wished to feel those blades digging into her skin, pulling her veins apart, because compared to this pain, that evisceration would be so clean and sweet. But no matter how hard she wished it she could not will it into being, and when the scarlet fog lifted she was still alive, and Peter was still dying.

She screamed her muffled screams until Peter’s cries faded to nothing, until his blood was drained into those fat pouches. Then she got up, wiped her face, and kept on running.

FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT Alice roamed the dunes. Landmarks drifted in and out of the edges of her vision. Gleaming bones. Jagged rocks. All of Violence looked the same, a barren field stretching endless from the river.

She would have preferred to faint, for that would have relieved her of the burden of consciousness, but she was filled with adrenaline. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she could nearly feel her pulse in her dry mouth and ringing ears—she had to keep moving, she decided; she would simply keep moving until that terrible energy exhausted itself and she broke down.

Still the moment wouldn’t come, so Alice kept moving.

Her head would not quiet. She tried her staircase; she strained to focus; none of it worked; the television blared. She could only replay in excruciating detail every second of those final moments inside the pit.

Peter’s scribbling. The arc of chalk on sand. His soft, sweet smile. She couldn’t determine whether she’d done enough—if she’d protested harder, if she’d convinced him otherwise, if she’d wrestled that chalk out of his

hand . . . But these were questions that had no answers. All she could remember was her cries, and Peter’s resolve.

Peter—Peter—Peter. Her memory track slid sideways, conjuring back every detail. The flop of his hair, the warmth of his curved frame against her back. The sweet, slightly musty scent that floated around him when it was late, when he hadn’t showered. The sound of his voice, his laugh. Peter had such a wonderful laugh. It gripped all of him, made his arms and shoulders shake; it had a vulnerable, helpless quality to it, as if it seized him completely and he had no choice but to submit to his mirth.

Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next. But Peter wasn’t here anymore; the Kripkes had drained his blood and obliterated his soul; he wasn’t in any world anymore, this one or the next, and it was all her fault.

Her guilt accumulated with every step. She kept retracing the worst decisions she’d made. The resentment simmering under her skin every time she saw him on campus. The disdain she felt for his smile. All those quips and jabs. The worst things she’d believed about him; her vile resentment.

Ugly, wretched, petty—it was like watching a horror film from within her own body; she recognized herself as the actor but could not grasp the logic of every awful decision. She didn’t recognize this person, this nasty resentful scheming little bitch. But memories didn’t lie. She had done and said it all, and she had to live with the guilt.

All Peter had ever done was save her life. Meanwhile all Alice had ever done was hurt the people trying to help her, and it was so obvious she didn’t deserve to live, and she wished she could just get it over with and die, except that, for Peter’s sake, this was the one thing she could not do.

THE SUN ROSE. THE DIM ORANGE light illuminated rolling desert all around her.

The silhouettes of the early courts had long disappeared. Alice had not realized until now how much she would miss them. Dreadful and claustrophobic as they were, they were at least familiar, were tangible structures she could touch and recognize and ground herself in. What she would give now for a nap in Desire, or even a study break in Pride! They oriented her, even if all their directions were false. But here the world grew

further and further from the world that mortal souls knew, and this unanchoring terrified her.

She was deep in Cruelty. At some point in the night, she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree.

Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty fucked with you on purpose.

She kept coming across mysterious structures—interlacing bone, precipitously balanced, arranged occasionally like abstract art. Shapes carved out on the sand. Footsteps, maybe human, dancing in patterns she couldn’t make sense of. Sometimes she found what looked like paths, lines traced carefully in imitation of road marks, only they ended abruptly or turned back in on themselves. Near the shore she glimpsed once a semicircle of slabs that called to mind lawn chairs on the green. Deep in her journey she found a pure, smooth marble block, about the size of a door, unmarked and unguarded. She spent the better part of an hour running her hands around the block, trying to detect any clues about its presence, trying to lure its creator out from hiding. But this block yielded nothing; no secret carvings, no hidden design. She screamed in frustration, and kicked at the block until her toes hurt.

She tried to conjure an explanation for it all. Suppose the Shades sought shelter. Suppose these arrangements were temporary houses, stations in which to rest and reflect. Suppose the Shades threw beach parties here.

Suppose the Shades put on art exhibits. But really it seemed like bones thrown together in some attempt at amusement—at making meaning upon a plane that was, fundamentally, meaningless. Alice saw clearly now she was trespassing across the desert of consciousness, a map of madness; and the landmarks she witnessed were just the same delusions of everyone who had come before.

Now and then she saw glittering oases out of the corner of her eye. She did not stop to drink. She still had her copied Perpetual Flask, and she knew better than to drink Hell’s water. But once she detoured, curious, toward a pool. She thought she might run her fingers through that gleaming surface.

She wondered if there would be drowned things below, hints of what came before. But when she knelt and reached, her hands found a solid surface. No water here; just a sheet of obsidian glass. Someone had polished and sculpted it with just enough curve so that even up close, it looked liquid.

Alice thought about searching for meaning here, but the marble block had taught her better. She kept walking.

Sometime around sunset tall, white structures appeared on the horizon.

She gravitated toward them, for the most basic need of a destination more than anything else. As she approached the white things she began to hear low, guttural moans. They were so faint at first that she did not register them as human at all. They sounded rather like empty glass bottles blowing when wind hit their apertures. Then she came closer, and looked up. She saw skeletal cages above—reminiscent of dustland construction, abandoned building frames—only these were made of alabaster bone, and glimmered under the sun. Their construction was exquisite, a lattice network of bones fit together just so, so that groove rested perfectly against groove, so that those cages swayed back and forth but never fell.

She wondered if these were built by deities. But there was something gorgeous about their mathematical perfection. These were projects possible only if you had eons of time, and a singular devastating focus. The structures of Hell were dreamscapes that emerged effortless from the mist.

These cages took effort. They were meticulously human.

Trapped inside were Shades; hands clenching the bars, moaning in disharmony. Alice’s mind flashed ridiculously to study rooms, to carrels at exam time; rooms filled by lowered heads and hunched shoulders in uniform solitude. Whenever the carrels were all booked up some students would build their own carrels from books, walling themselves in, hostile in their focus. This hopeless atmosphere—oh, she remembered it well; she had felt it acutely before. You could not walk through those carrels without choking in despair.

These Shades did not seem trapped against their will. Those bars were very wide. Alice saw no guards, no chains. And those were not cries of despair. Were not voluntary noises at all. The sound was not of them, but moved through them, an involuntary response against physical forces. The necessary reaction to let the universe know you were still there. Was this punishment, or a refuge? Perhaps both. It wasn’t clear. Alice could only assume, like everything else, this was some way to make Hell more bearable. She could imagine a kind of peace up there in the sky, trapped in her own cage. Barely visible around her, others in their own cages as well— and the comfort of knowing that others were just as alone as you were. Far

away from the cruel desert where nothing could touch you, an oasis unto

yourself.

She cupped her hands around her mouth.

“Hello up there,” she called. She felt a sudden urge to join them. Right then nothing seemed better than a spiraling cage of her own, just and eternal. I want to moan too, I want to vanish into despair. “Hello?

The Shades did not acknowledge her.

“Hello? Might I come up there?”

A short pause to the moaning. Then it continued, redoubled, as if determined to drown out the interruption.

Alice felt very silly then, so she trudged on. Let them have it their way, she thought. Those cages were ugly anyhow. She could build a prison all on her own.

BY MIDAFTERNOON, THE SAND HAD HARDENED into cracked, brown rock. No more were the alien rocks and taunting patterns. She had gone from desert to deadlands. There was a difference; one was muted life and one was the scorched earth after everything living was burned away. The air here felt thicker, dryer and hotter. It smelled of frustration; of thirst never slaked.

Alice figured she was approaching the boundary between Cruelty and Tyranny.

There was no line in the sand, nothing that declared a hard and fast distinction between the cruel man’s blows and the tyrant’s cunning manipulation. Still Alice could tell the difference. The air sat heavy on her tongue. There was a metallic, musty tang here. The wind rose, a blistering force that rubbed her cheeks raw. She clutched her hood around her face.

Her knuckles cracked and bled.

The Shades, too, acted differently. All the Shades of the previous courts had been harmless, too caught up with their own suffering to pay Alice much notice. But the Shades of Tyranny, sparse as they were, seemed aware of her and of each other in a way that made her uneasy. Several times she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, or glimpsed faces watching her from the trees. Yet every time she turned, they had disappeared.

She knew not what they wanted from her, or indeed, what they could do to her. She only felt their malice all about, constant and sharp, prickling like ant bites.

But she couldn’t turn back. There was nowhere else to go. So she wrapped her jacket tighter around herself, kept her knife close at her belt, and trudged on.

THE SUN SANK AND VANISHED. ALICE walked until her limbs shook, and then she hunkered down in the shadow of a boulder to examine what supplies she still had with her. The Lembas Bread was waterlogged, but the bits in the middle were still good. All the tea was foul with bog water—she threw that away. Miraculously the copied flask still worked. She drank one cup of clear good water, then another, and then six.

Body sated, mind cleared, she unfortunately began to think.

In the process of keeping herself alive, she realized she had to come up with a justification for all this effort.

What she knew was that she didn’t fear death anymore. She had seen the other side in that Escher trap, and like a child receiving her first flu jab, or emerging intact from the dentist’s office, she understood there was nothing much to fear. Death was just nothing. A twinge of pain, and that was it. And she had it better than any Shades, for she didn’t even have the afterlife to contend with. Only the vanishing of the self, and the end of all obligations.

But the question now—now that she was no longer motivated by the instinctive fear of death, now that she had no urgent reason to keep running —was what came next. She had a bigger problem on her hands now, which was the point of living. Living meant a future meant some teleological end, but Alice could not figure out what on earth she was going on for.

Her original quest seemed so silly now. She didn’t care to find Professor Grimes. She might be content if she never saw Professor Grimes again. The scales had fallen from her eyes. But she could not imagine any other future for herself. Everything she’d ever wanted now felt so frivolous; their pursuit agonizing. She imagined standing before her dissertation committee; receiving her marks from Grimes; moving on to her own job posting where another crop of miserable graduate students would come up under her tutelage. She imagined becoming a part of the cycle. She would rather have a cell in Desire.

Meanwhile death was so present, and obvious, and enticing.

Alas, she had put her mind to it, and her mind had settled on two premises that formed the incontrovertible conclusion that she must live.

First, because Peter had asked her to, and she owed him that much.

And second, because of his ridiculous hope that, at the end of everything, one might make an exception of Hell.

Damn Peter and his exceptions. Whether she liked it or not, he’d buried within her a seed that she couldn’t grind away. Like Dante’s Adam and Noah, like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, like the possibility of a True Contradiction, maybe going on meant believing in what she couldn’t possibly know. Maybe if she went on she could find some way to make this pain stop. Maybe. Maybe.

Follow the river. Rescue Professor Grimes. Get out. Alice felt no internal motivation toward these objectives, but they were the only scripts she had, and they were better than nothing. At least they gave her reason to put one foot in front of another, again and again, until the minutes turned to hours turned to miles over endless silt.

THE NEXT DAY, ALICE CAME UPON the tower.

She saw its shadow first, for she had been trekking with her head stooped, registering nothing but the ground before her. At first she found it odd, this streak of darker ground among the gray, but then she lifted her eyes and saw a great spire not a hundred yards off; a single, sharp point on the horizon. Ah, she thought, it’s a clock tower, it’s the center of campus; for at Cornell you never needed a watch nor a map, you only gazed up to the bell tower, and you knew your way home. But of course it was not a clock tower, for in Hell there was no time to keep, no reason for bells to ring, and near the top where a clock face should have been was only a blank circle.

That is cruel, she thought. You did that on purpose, that is so very cruel.

As she drew closer she realized the tower base was not built with rock as she’d thought, but sprawled and twisting forms—human faces and torsos, piled upon one another, frozen in their fight to climb away. Whether they were Shades or likenesses carved in stone, she could not tell. Arcing round the tower base was a line of rocks balanced over raised bits of dirt. A low wall, and easily trespassed, but a boundary nonetheless.

She heard a hissing. She looked up.

Upon the balcony stood three deities. Tall sinuous bodies, skin like marble, garbed in flowing cloth of the deepest red. Great hulking wings protruded from their shoulders. Alice understood these must be the Erinyes.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, chthonic creatures born of that blood shed from that first broken oath, when Kronos slew his father and cast his parts into the ocean. One for anger, one for rage, and one for endless destruction.

Dark, curling hair undulated round their faces. They were very beautiful.

All three looked down on her at once.

Their eyes were without pupils; a singular scorching gaze. Alice felt a terrible heat as they scrutinized her, more intense even than Professor Grimes’s gaze had ever been. She felt stripped of her clothes; of her flesh and bone. She was only soul, shuddering and naked, unable to conceal every evil or selfish thought she’d ever held. It seemed to linger for an eternity. Every thought extricated, suspended, turned over, and carefully considered. She was reduced to her unexamined truths. And a deep triplet voice echoing round her skull, demanding again and again: Whose oaths have you broken?

Alice squeezed her own eyes shut but it did not matter; still the Erinyes’ gaze scorched her mind. She felt so small, tiny and mortal and pathetic. She felt like she had never had an original thought in her life. A confessor laying everything bare, only there was nothing interesting to say, only the normal human filth. I was proud, I desired, I was greedy, I was wrathful— WHOSE OATHS HAVE YOU BROKEN?

“All of them,” she gasped. “I don’t know—”

LIAR, they three spoke at once.

The heat intensified. Hell faded out into a white plane, upon which Alice could only see moving shadows. A body spinning upside down. A noose. A heap. Flames licked around her face. Her ears thundered, the heat sharpened, and Alice heard the Furies cackling, and the burning question repeated until it scorched into her mind:

Why—

Why—

Tell us— Why?

But this was just the thing she could not answer herself. She knew she had erred, but her sins felt like they had been committed by someone else, for reasons she could not fathom, and the only defense she could offer was

that along every step of the way, from start to finish, each next move had in that very moment seemed the only rational thing. Grimes died, so Alice went to Hell; Peter hurt her, so she hurt him back. Elspeth had what they needed, and so they tried to steal. One thing led to another and that was all.

She didn’t mean to obfuscate. She wanted to be good for these beautiful burning women. She wanted to confess all, except every way she cast it made it seem that much flimsier, trite and convenient, as if her whole life story were beads knocking about an abacus. “I was just trying,” she whispered. “I only—I was only doing my best.”

Abruptly the flames died. The heat vanished. Alice lurched forward and gasped, small and limp, a candle doused in water. High above atop their perch, the Erinyes threw their heads back and laughed.

“Professor Grimes,” said Alice. “Is he here?”

The Erinyes ignored her. They shook in their mirth; their great wings pulsing, magnificent heads thrown back, displaying proud, white necks.

Come in if you wish, said their laughter. We care not.

So Alice stepped over the wall, and entered the final court of Hell.

THE EIGHTH COURT WAS VERY QUIET. Whatever Shades lurked on the border seemed wary of the tower, and as she continued forth, their malicious presence faded. She was all alone now. Gradually the tower receded into a tiny prick on the horizon, and vanished, leaving Alice in a truly empty terrain: the river constant on her left, a sheet of orange above, a sheet of gray stretching endless to the right. She was dazed enough to find this pretty, this geometrical neatness. Here were three concepts displayed with perfection. Finite boundary, finite point, infinite plane. I live now in a textbook, she thought; I am a diagram of the Poincaré disk.

She saw then specks whirling gently in the air before her. Further ahead, more white specks littered the ground.

Birds? How lovely that would be. Alice had seen a beach once just before dawn, while all the seagulls were still asleep. She had always imagined that seagulls slept in nests; she did not know they also slept on the beach, heads tucked into their downy backs, little white lumps dotting the sandbar. She drew closer, and was disappointed to find those white things were not birds but scraps of paper. She reached out and picked one up.

Strange, after all these immaterial shades, to touch something so incredibly

human and material. It was modern paper, too. Smooth, bright stuff, with none of the ink bleeding or rough textures that dated older papers. These were not the detritus of Elspeth’s collection, old unwanted things scrounged from the living. This was fresh stationery, sourced from Hell.

The page Alice held was blank. Others, however, seemed covered in lines. She chased another paper in the wind, snatched it, and held it up to her face. The handwriting was so looping and messy she could hardly make out what it said. Really the only legible fragment was what appeared to be a table of contents.

Part One—My Upbringing Part Two—My Pathology Part Three—My Unfortunate and Inevitable Criminality

Why, thought Alice, these were rough drafts of a dissertation. They obeyed the structure of a dissertation precisely—the flow of chapters, the slow development of arguments over three clearly delineated sections.

There were footnotes, appendices, and even a dramatic conclusion, with stakes and implications for the field: “Why I Therefore Deserve Redemption, and a Ride Across the Lethe.”

She skimmed one page of the section titled “Part One—My Upbringing.” Her eyes fell on several footnotes professing that the author’s family was of little means, and so he had no choice but to run in the streets and fall in with the bad sort rather than growing up pursuing virtuous hobbies like playing the violin. His father had beat him, and this instilled in him a hatred of the world. His mother turned a blind eye, and his sisters mocked him, and his German nanny often sent him to bed without his supper, and this instilled in him a fierce hatred of the other sex.

Alice flipped to the section labeled “Part Three—My Unfortunate Criminality.”

I did not mean to do what I did, stated the author, and then went on to describe his violent crime. There Alice saw quite a lot of passive constructions. My heart was seized with rage. My hand was possessed of a knife.

She let the page drift away and plucked another out of the air. This one was written in a different handwriting, and seemed preoccupied with the many reasons why women, in fact, enjoyed being raped. She plucked yet

another page. Murder of the elderly is a social necessity, it argued. They are a drain on resources and annoying besides.

Not the work of a single madman, then. For whatever reason Lower Hell was full of authors justifying their sins, and from the looks of it, producing many failed drafts. Alice wondered who this was written for, and who was reading, and which divine reader was deeming these dissertations unworthy of a pass. What would that reader make of her excuses? What excuses could she possibly make?

SHE CONTINUED ON UNTIL THE SUN fell again, and then she sat down and made her little camp. She nibbled a bit of Lembas Bread. She had left only one morsel the length of her index finger, which made eight pinches she could spread over eight days. She chugged from the Perpetual Flask until her stomach hurt, which was the second-best thing to being full. No matter how much she drank, however, her tongue still felt like sandpaper. Yet the rest of her felt deliciously light, a feeling she remembered well from lab days; the days she hadn’t eaten, and was deliberately not eating anymore, just to push the boundaries of how little she needed it. She knew not to trust that lightness. It was always the prelude to the crash.

She wished she could find any sort of shelter. The tower was long behind her, and all that lay before her was open terrain. There were not even boulders against which she might curl. The best she could do was throw her jacket over her head and take refuge in an ostrich’s logic—maybe if she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. She pulled her legs beneath her and wrapped her hands around her head.

Something snuffled against her side. She cracked her eyes open.

Archimedes was carefully arranging himself in a ball inside her shadow.

His fur was scarred and matted; a trickle of dried blood had hardened against his face. Alice blinked several times, hoping she had not hallucinated his presence; but every time she looked, the cat was still there.

She reached with a palm to stroke his side, though stopped when the cat

flinched from her touch.

“Did they get you too?”

Archimedes mewed. His right eye seemed unable to open. His left met her gaze, a hard green glint.

“Looks like you gave them hell, though.”

Archimedes sniffed.

“Made out better than we did, anyway.” She tried again to stroke him, though this time she made sure first he knew where her hand was. This time he let her, pressing the top of his head into her palm. “Good for you.”

She pulled herself to a sitting position and fished some Lembas Bread from the rucksack. The cat watched, unmoving, as she arranged it on a bit of wrapping before him. “Go on,” she said.

He stretched his head forth to nibble.

“I thought cats were obligate carnivores,” said Alice.

Archimedes wriggled his bum, which seemed to be cat-speak for I do what I want.

“What’s happened?” Alice asked. “Where’s Elspeth?”

Archimedes did not answer.

“Maybe we can look out for one another,” said Alice. “Keep watch, and all that.”

Archimedes made no indication he’d heard her.

“Please stay,” said Alice. “I don’t—I can’t make it all alone.”

Archimedes stretched forward and rested his head between his front legs. His rump settled unhelpfully atop the hilt of her knife. Then his right eye closed.

How stupid, Alice thought, pleading for help from a cat.

But it was still a comfort, watching that matted, blood-streaked flank rise and fall. Archimedes made a little wheezing noise every time he breathed in. The whole of his little rib cage trembled with the effort, but this did not disturb his slumber. He did not seem in any hurry to abandon her.

Alice supposed life did survive down here after all; kicking and biting and snarling its way through. The indomitable will to live. She lay down next to the cat, curling her own torso around him like a fortress, and wondered where she might find that in herself.

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