Katabasis — Chapter no 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A small, fidgety Shade guarded the pale doors of Dis. He watched them approach with his chest puffed out; one hand on his hip, one hand clutching a black spear with a carved stone tip. He slammed this spear thrice on the marble as they ascended. “Who dares enter the Great City of the Damned?”

“Bugger off, Parmenides,” said Gradus. “It’s me.”

Parmenides squinted at Alice. “Then who’s this?”

“She’s new,” said Gradus.

“Ooh hoo hoo!” Parmenides’s chuckle scaled up and down several octaves. He leered at Alice. “What are you in for, dear?”

“Don’t answer.” Gradus pushed his way past Parmenides. The doors rumbled open at his touch.

“Murder?” asked Parmenides. “Poisoning? Did you touch a child?”

Gradus waved a hand. “Come along, Alice.”

Alice scurried behind him.

“Trade you a story for a story,” Parmenides called behind them. Alice was afraid he would follow them through, but he only stood on the threshold, brandishing his spear as the doors screeched against the marble

floor. “You know where to find me.”

The doors thudded shut.

Inside was darkness, cool and silent. Gradus drifted down a hall to the right. Alice followed. She heard a crescendoing hubbub of voices, just before Gradus opened a door and they spilled out into a courtyard, open space enclosed by four walls that reminded Alice of abbey cloisters.

Nothing green grew, but the sculptural arrangement of rocks, and the floral mosaic patterns across the tile, suggested a meticulous attempt at upkeep.

The effect was surprisingly pleasant. A tall, twisted white tree stood at its center, and Alice could not tell if it was dead or carved from stone. Under its branches, clumped in groups of three or four, milled several dozen murmuring Shades.

“Think your professor’s in here?” Gradus asked.

Alice couldn’t be sure. The problem was there were too many Shades who looked like Professor Grimes in this courtyard. She had not expected to end up in a courtyard so full of middle-aged men. Half of them wore glasses, and all were draped in some version of the dark Oxbridge robe.

“Go on!”

“That’s right, go on!”

Quite a lot of the Shades were clustered in a huddle in the far corner of the courtyard. They were egging on one Shade at the wall, who stood with one hand grasping a thick stack of bound pages, the other resting on what looked like the handle of a library book-drop drawer embedded in the wall.

He kept pulling it open, shuddering as if in panic, and letting it slide closed.

Each time he did, the Shades booed in chorus.

“Let it drop,” they cried. “Let it drop!”

“Suppose it’s not ready,” said the Shade at the wall.

“Not this again.”

“It’s been decades.”

“If not now, when?”

“All right,” said the Shade. “All right.”

He squeezed his eyes shut—and looked rather silly as he did so, like a child pinching his nose before jumping into a pool—and slid his dissertation into the drawer. He let go and flinched back. The drawer slammed shut with a resounding metal twang. Everyone glared expectantly at the drawer, but nothing happened. Eventually there was a lukewarm smatter of applause. The Shades continued watching the drawer for a few moments and then dispersed again into their cliques, murmuring in

disappointment.

“What happened?” Alice asked.

“Someone’s just submitted a dissertation,” said Gradus.

“Where’s that drawer lead?”

“No one knows. Only whatever goes in that slot can never be retrieved.”

“So when will they get their marks?”

“Marks.” Gradus chuckled. “Imagine, marks. No, they don’t tell you anything unless you’ve passed. We don’t get revisions. We receive no feedback whatsoever. We just wait in anticipation forever and ever, until hope turns to panic to disappointment. If you hear nothing, then you must assume you’ve failed. Only there’s never confirmation, and timelines here mean nothing, and so it’s up to you when to extinguish your own hope.”

Under the tree, several Shades bickered over the same question.

“I’m telling you, the Furies aren’t reading them.”

“Well if not the Furies, then who?”

“You must be new here,” scoffed one Shade, and this roused chuckles around the courtyard. “It’s the victims, see, we’ve got to wait for the victims to die, and then they decide if it’s sufficient—”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would the victims hang around?”

“What did Socrates say? Their calls are followed by supplication, as they beg their victims to permit their exit from their river . . .”

“Socrates was put to death for being annoying, Socrates’s opinion doesn’t count for anything.”

“Anyhow, who cares about the victims’ opinions? What makes them such moral experts?”

“Right, suppose two robbers shoot each other in the head at the same moment.”

“Come on, that’s not what happened to you.”

“Point-blank and the other guy in bed, is more like it was—”

“But suppose,” insisted the Shade who’d first leveled the objection.

“Suppose two robbers shoot each other, and they’re both victims and perpetrators, and no one has the moral high ground. Who’s reading then?

Whose forgiveness matters? Who gets to decide?”

There was a hubbub of voices as Shades descended to weigh in on moral agency, forgiveness, and whether you could still be wronged if you did something wrong first. This seemed an old topic in the courtyard, something controversial and divisive and somehow such a familiar argument that all sides had long rehearsed their positions. Someone shouted about Jesus and unconditional love, and the whole forum groaned.

The Shade who had submitted his dissertation stood hunched and alone at the wall, looking forlorn. Every now and then he traced a finger across the drawer handle, as if he could will it to respond.

“Come on.” Gradus urged Alice toward an exit across the courtyard.

“We’ll try the Writing Bazaar first. Then the workshops.”

ALICE THOUGHT PERHAPS GRADUS MEANT “WRITING Bazaar” in the sense that Harper’s Bazaar meant “bazaar,” which is to say a metaphorical

marketplace of ideas. She expected a conference, perhaps, or a shelf of print journals. She did not anticipate a bazaar in the fantastic Oriental sense: a chaotic marketplace, stalls and stalls in rows where hawkers yelled their goods and Shades drifted through the rows, buying and bartering. After the stretching silence of the desert this was all quite overwhelming, and Alice nearly tripped over a Shade squatting by the gate. The Shade squawked and fell back, toppling stacks of yellowed paper behind her.

“I’m sorry,” gasped Alice. “I didn’t see you—”

The Shade muttered something Alice could not make out. Though she did not seem to be speaking to Alice. Rather, she whispered something fiercely at the sheet of paper she clutched in her hands. Alice realized then that the Shade was reading each page out loud at a crawling pace, stopping every so often to mutter questions about prepositional phrases and object pronouns. She had beside her a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which Alice had not seen since grade school.

“She’s fine,” said Gradus, tugging her along. “She’s just doing

copyedits.”

“Copyedits?”

“Lots of Shades believe they can fail for the slightest spelling error.

They spend decades combing over their manuscripts before they feel comfortable submitting.”

Alice thought of Professor Grimes, whose eyes slid so quickly over student papers she wondered sometimes if he registered their content at all.

“Do the judges even care?”

“No one knows,” said Gradus. “They never explain why they reject dissertations. All we can do is cover our bases as best we can.”

Behind them, the Shade was howling and smacking herself against the temple.

“Stupid,” she cried. “Stupid, stupid—it’s two spaces after each period!

Oh, it’s all got to be redone!”

The next stall was completely taken over by pyramids of used books.

The collection was enormous. Elspeth’s library was paltry in comparison.

All the books were battered and stained to various degrees. Some missed covers; some missed entire chunks in the middle; some appeared to have been dredged from the bottom of the river, dried, and painstakingly rebound with needle and thread. Still they looked and smelled enticing, for all books, like wine, had a readerly aroma that ripened with age, which was why

bookstores and libraries smelled so good. Alice’s fingers itched with the familiar urge to flip through the volumes. The hawker perked up when he sensed her attention. He passed immaterial through the piles and stopped right before her. “De Quincey?” He held up two volumes, one thick and one

slim. “De Sade?”

“None today, thank you,” said Gradus.

“You sure? De Sade’s very fun. If not for remorse, then for titillation.”

Gradus held up a hand as he moved past. “We’re fine.”

“Rousseau, then,” called the hawker. “You’ll like that.”

“What’s he mean?” asked Alice.

“He sells confessional texts,” said Gradus. “Saint Augustine, Saint Patrick, and so on. Lots of folks here think that’s the template.”

“So they read for inspiration?”

“Sure. Or to cheat. People like to copy down all the good bits—the part about souls being rendered in two, the fires of guilt burning you up from the inside, blah blah blah.”

“Or divine salvation,” called the hawker. “New translated edition of Crime and Punishment here now, brand-new, excavated in mint condition from a Derbyshire tomb—”

“No, thank you.” Gradus quickened his pace.

“Does that work?” Alice hurried behind him. “Copying down confessions?”

“Oh, never. They always know when it’s not original work. They take plagiarism quite seriously here—somehow folks always forget. A while ago someone copied two sentences from the Confessions of an English Opium- Eater and they wouldn’t let him touch paper again for fifty years.”

“Gosh,” Alice muttered. “Who wouldn’t do their own work in Hell?”

“Everyone,” said Gradus. “Haven’t you ever had writer’s block?”

“Well of course, but—”

“Did someone mention writer’s block?”

Alice ran smack into what felt like a great, meaty wall. She stumbled black. Before her stood a veritable centaur; a man’s head and muscly torso over the indigo-blue bottom of a horse. She would have found him very handsome, in the rugged mountain-man fashion, were his mouth not split in a massive, toothy grin that indicated he wanted to eat her.

“I’m sorry—”

“No apologies necessary.” He dipped his head and forelegs in a low bow that should not have looked so elegant as it did. His head ended up somewhere near Alice’s crotch, which was both startling and titillating. “I am Nessus.” His voice was wonderfully smooth. “Lower chthonic deity, itinerant writing tutor of Dis, at your service.”

“Bugger off,” said Gradus.

Nessus rose and grasped Alice’s hands. “Are you new to the city, love?

First time in the bazaar?”

“Yes, I—”

“Never fear!” He squeezed her hands tight. His skin was very warm. “I am here to offer any paper-writing services you need. Proposals, outlines, bibliographies, even entire dissertation chapters if you so desire. Rates are

negotiable—”

“Leave her alone,” said Gradus.

“Does that work?” asked Alice, intrigued.

“Of course it doesn’t,” said Gradus. “No one wants those phony essays.”

“Our essays are the best on the market.” Nessus continued to ignore Gradus. Indeed, every time Gradus spoke, Nessus only opened his mouth further, continuing on with his pitch at a deafening shout. “WE HAVE HELPED HUNDREDS OF SOULS PASS THEIR DISSERTATION DEFENSES AND FIND PASSAGE ACROSS THE LETHE ON LONG-

AWAITED GOLDEN SHIPS—”

“It’s a complete scam,” said Gradus.

“OUR ESSAY WRITERS HAVE INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORKINGS OF THE UNDERWORLD. MANY HAVE WALKED THE SANDS OF DEATH SINCE THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD—”

“But you’re all deities!” Alice exclaimed. “What can you possibly want for trade from humans?”

Nessus ceased his shouting, looked her up and down, and murmured close into her ear. “A human soul can be useful in more ways than one.”

Alice did not quite understand what he meant, but she knew enough to jerk her hands away.

“Leave her alone.” Gradus grasped Alice’s arm and dragged her down the stalls. Nessus did not follow. When Alice glanced back over her shoulder he was in avid negotiations with another Shade, haggling over word counts and delivery times.

“Haven’t you ever been in a market before?” Gradus demanded. “You keep your gaze forward, you never respond—”

“Sorry,” Alice gasped. “It’s just—there’s so many—”

“The bazaar is built to distract,” said Gradus. “This is Lord Yama’s design. There’s a million things to keep a soul from writing, all in the service of making you better at it. Remember that, Alice Law. Hell is a writers’ market.”

The bazaar seemed endless. Lost in the thick of it, Alice could not see any way out. Only Gradus seemed to know where they were going, ducking and weaving around hawkers with irritable indifference. They passed stalls of writing accoutrements and productivity cures—old typewriters, reams of paper, sand hourglasses (“DON’T PROCRASTINATE FOR ETERNITY!”), self-help books (How to Write a Confession in Ten Days, Two Thousand Words a Day: The Augustinian Method), and black quills advertised as bona fide vulture feathers (“SAY NO TO THE TYPEWRITER: WRITE IN ANALOG TO PROMPT YOUR CREATIVE MIND”). Alice couldn’t quite understand what passed for currency in Dis—she saw Shades exchanging all sorts of trinkets, from buttons to bottle caps to what appeared to be human knucklebones—but the trade, evidently, was thriving.

The traffic thickened. They pushed their way forth and came upon a packed crowd gathered around a creature—a deity, Alice saw, a giant with an elephantine head, his skull studded with too many eyes. Two great horns extended from his temples, but Alice’s eyes could not track where they ended. She could only describe those horn tips as ending many places at once, a cloud of probability. Indeed Alice found the deity himself hard to look at; his form kept shifting in space, so that the moment she thought she had fixed him in her vision, he was several inches to the left.

“Who—”

“Laplace’s Demon,” said Gradus.

“Laplace’s Demon is real?”

“Oh, yes. He likes to wander the bazaar and talk people into thinking nothing is their fault. Sets them back decades in their progress. Come round this way, you’ll get lost in the crush.”

Alice followed him to the edge of the crowd. The demon’s followers listened in rapturous excitement as he pronounced facts about their lives, explanations of their pathology. Someone’s pet cat had died when they were

ten. Someone had been spanked too hard by a babysitter. Someone was

genetically predisposed to anger.

“How does he do that?”

“Well, he’s a determinist,” said Gradus. “So he thinks just because he knows everything about you, that frees you of all personal responsibility

from everything you’ve ever done.”

“How would that work?”

“Laplace’s Demon has been observing the universe since its very beginning,” said Gradus. “Or so he says. The first collision of atoms, the big bang, all that. He watched the first cells on Earth become sentient life.

He watched as the atoms they were composed of interacted in new and exciting combinations to create generations. He knows, because of set natural laws of the universe, precisely how those atoms will interact in the future to form new combinations, and so on. He knows, when you are deciding between an apple and orange, what you will choose. He knows if someday you will betray your husband, or drown your child. He knows all, for every ill deed you have ever done was determined the day you were born. Life is a set course that you were born onto, a course you can never escape. You don’t know that you are even following it.”

“What if I choose different?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Gradus. “He will have anticipated this too. He knows one day you will think of determinism and feel compelled to resist.

And he knows you will choose what seems unpredictable for the sake of it.

Laplace’s Demon knows all.”

“And that means no one can ever be responsible for anything.” Alice had caught on now. “Which means there’s no concept of guilt, or culpability . . . I mean, could it work? If you could explain all your sins as the product of forces outside your control?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

She huffed. “Don’t you know anything?”

“I know everything there is to know about this place,” said Gradus.

“And I’m offering that knowledge freely, by the way, which is a better deal than you’d get elsewhere.”

“Then how come you can’t say how a dissertation passes?”

“Because.” Again Gradus’s essence took on that frightening, deadened calque. Alice felt the weight of accumulation, of layers on layers of time. “I don’t know how it’s done. Because nobody knows how it’s done. Because I

have never once seen a passing dissertation in the entire time I have been in Hell. Because many of us think that the dissertation is a pointless exercise offered by sadistic deities to keep us distracted, because wouldn’t that be so funny, wouldn’t it be the best and cruelest joke to keep us running in circles around the bazaar forever. Because none of us in this wretched place have ever been given reason to hope.”

“Oh,” said Alice, in a very small voice. “I see.”

Dis did not feel so impressive now. The bazaar’s hustle was no longer amusing. Now the stalls and crowds struck her as a dreadful show; teeming and desperate, hamsters spinning circles in a pathetic ornate cage, all to avoid the only question that seemed to matter: why did you sin?

Could she write her own way out of Hell? Alice wondered. If she somehow died a natural death, if she ended up in Dis. Could she face down the blank white paper and tell the truth?

She knew what her great crime was. She had let Peter Murdoch die. She had killed Peter Murdoch.

Now, Alice knew from conversations in hall that the philosophers at Cambridge were greatly concerned with the difference between killing and letting die. Some argued that there was no distinction: that if you knew the cause of death and failed to stop it even if you were able, then that was morally tantamount to murder. Others disagreed. Letting die might be morally callous, they argued, but it entailed refusing to get involved in a situation, not bringing it about. If letting die was so evil, were we responsible for not doing anything about world poverty? About orphans starving continents away? So one might reasonably convince Alice that no, none of this was her fault. She didn’t throw them off the Neurath, she didn’t lay the Escher trap, and she didn’t make Peter sacrifice himself. She’d simply failed to stop it all, and she couldn’t be blamed for that.

But this reasoning didn’t stand up to intuition. Alice knew also that in criminal defense, there was a type of argument called “but for.” But for your actions, would this car have crashed? Would this child have drowned?

But for Alice Law, would Peter Murdoch be dead? The answer was obviously no. Alice could draw a straight line from her own stupidity and selfishness to Peter’s sacrifice. And she knew, if she ever died properly in the world above, if she ever escaped back to the world above, she would end up right back here atoning for the murder of Peter Murdoch’s immortal soul. But if she was ready to admit this, if she laid it all down on paper,

would that be sufficient? Was it enough to declare what she’d done and admit full responsibility for it? Certainly that was too easy, for if so there would not be so many frustrated souls in Dis. Certainly not all of these souls were deceiving themselves. Certainly, after decades in this pathetic din, one would prefer to tell the truth.

But that meant Hell demanded something more than a guilty plea. That the Furies, or whoever that mysterious they was, if they existed at all, expected a more profound acknowledgment of guilt. And whatever this was —whether because her mind would not admit it, or because it was out of the grasp of her understanding—Alice was not certain she could ever put it down on paper, or set it to words at all.

GRADUS LED HER OUT OF THE bazaar and into another series of hallways until he stopped before a plain, unmarked door. “The workshop,” he said, and pushed it open. Inside was an unadorned room containing one long, oval table, at which sat a dozen or so Shades perched on metal folding chairs— very specifically, the kind of folding chairs with a gap just large enough to frustrate any hope of back support, and rusted metal bolts that threatened to splice you open whenever you tried to fold them up. The room was badly lit. The air smelled of cat piss.

A meeting was in progress. The Shades were hunched over a smattering of papers, debating something that had to do with “domestic violence” and “moral culpability.”

Alice scanned their faces. All dour, focused expressions. Thick scowling brows; mouths pressed in thin lines of concentration. Half wore spectacles.

The other details of their garb had faded, leaving plain dark robes, and this gave them a vaguely Victorian air. These Shades looked ready to expound on the phrenological markers of intelligence across races. If ever there was a room in Hell where Grimes belonged, thought Alice, it was here. But none of the faces matched.

“He’s not here,” she whispered to Gradus. “We should—”

The door slammed shut behind them. The meeting fell silent. The Shades looked up and stared.

“Ah, Professor Gradus.” The Shade at the head of the table rose to his feet. A brass placard before him read, Chairman. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Went on a retreat,” said Gradus. “Needed to clear my head.”

“Well, we are not giving you comments,” pouted a Shade to the chairman’s left. “You know the rules. You give critique to get critique, you can’t just disappear for years and then expect us all to help—”

“That’s fine,” said Gradus. “I’m only here to observe.”

“Gradus,” Alice whispered again. But he ignored her.

“Who’s she?” asked the chairman.

All eyes turned to Alice.

“New blood,” said Gradus. “Only just arrived.”

“I thought we said no newcomers,” said the Shade to the chairman’s left.

“She’s still getting oriented,” said Gradus. “Hasn’t started writing yet. I thought you lot could share a bit of your wisdom. Show her how it’s done.”

“But this is a serious writing group,” said the Shade. “We don’t take novices, they’re a waste of time.”

“The rule was ten years at least,” the chairman agreed.

“She’s a Cambridge postgrad,” said Gradus. “Analytic magick.”

The word Cambridge was like a spell. Even here, prestige opened doors. The Shades looked round at each other. A few shrugged. The chairman grunted. “I suppose she can audit. On a trial basis. You may take a

chair in the corner.”

“Go on,” Gradus told Alice. “Sit.”

Alice did not understand what they were still doing here. “But he’s not —”

Gradus nudged her forth. “The chairman invites you to sit.”

Alice realized then she was not in control here.

She’d been a fool to trust Gradus. She could not fathom what he wanted; she should not have played along. She didn’t understand what was happening now, but she did not like her chances in Dis alone, so she sat gingerly at the edge of her assigned chair and tried not to look too afraid.

Gradus remained standing beside her, his essence billowing around her like a cage.

“Might we get back to Professor Bent’s dissertation?” asked a monocled Shade. “If we’re quite done with interruptions?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” The chairman sat down. “Let us continue.

Professor Brown, you were saying . . . ?”

Professor Brown tapped the pages before him. “I do find this a bit revisionary. The tone is—well, it’s very combative, isn’t it? And the rebuttals to women’s liberation. Aren’t they a bit extreme?”

“I object,” said a Shade several seats down from Professor Brown. Alice presumed this was Professor Bent, author of said dissertation. He had a very long face, and a mouth startlingly far down from his nose, which seemed the natural result of a lifetime of stroking one’s chin as Professor Bent did now. “It’s—a bit contrarian, certainly, but it’s all telling the truth.”

“The truth is that all women are evil nags?”

“I’m sure some women are virtuous angels.” Professor Bent sniffed. “I won’t make sloppy generalizations. I only mean to say this woman, in her specific case, exemplified all the foibles of her sex. Not all women are jealous and aggravating and empty-headed. But this woman—”

“Yes, blah, blah, the Eve to your Adam, the source of all evil,” another Shade interjected. “It’s a boring interpretation, don’t you think? You minimize your own agency and demonize your wife—”

“What am I supposed to do?” demanded Professor Bent. “All I’ve written is the truth, no more, no less. I cannot fabricate arguments just to please an audience who is interested only in feminist interpretations. I refuse. It would be bad scholarship.”

“But this isn’t at all a confession,” said the monocled Shade. “This is

just a manifesto.”

“Well, I’ve nothing to confess.”

“Oh, why do you think you’re in Hell then, you idiot?”

“Now, now,” said the chairman. “Let us remain professional.”

“The concept of the confession is so Victorian,” said Professor Bent.

“Have you not read Foucault? Science sexualis. The confession is a repressive discursive form, through which no true knowledge can be produced. The confession is about hidden shame, guilt, extraction. But I will not be a prisoner on the rack, do you understand? I will not lie for freedom.”

“I’m not sure the Furies have read Foucault,” said the chairman. “You must consider your audience.”

Professor Bent sniffed. “Well, if the gods are perfect and all-knowing, then they should be amenable to reason. The gods should understand this mode of dissertation is antiquated, and that we gain nothing from self- flagellation. The gods should wish us to break free of our repression—”

“Why do we speak of the gods at all?”

A woman Shade sat at the opposite end of the table, her chair pulled slightly back so that she was half-hidden behind her peers. She wore her dark hair tied tightly in a bun, and when she leaned forward, Alice saw she had a severe, foxlike face. She had put much more effort into distinguishing her clothes than her peers. She wore a high-necked black dress, her white collar starched very clean, each pleat of her skirt pressed with precision.

“Ah, Gertrude,” said the chairman. “You wish to contribute? Speak up.”

Gertrude scraped her chair back and stood. “My question is, who wants reincarnation anyhow?”

“Not this again,” said Professor Brown. “Everyone wants rebirth, that’s why we’re here.”

“Have you not read The Republic?” Gertrude demanded. “Know you not the myth of Er? Ajax becomes a lion. Odysseus becomes an ordinary citizen. But the wicked have no right to choose. The wicked suffer in the next life.”

“We’ve been over this,” said the chairman. “We have no evidence that karma affects rebirth—”

“Yes, you’re right, all we have is a priori reason. But do you think our little punishments are enough? Do you really think, once our papers are polished and turned in, that the powers that be will see fit to reincarnate us as lords and ladies?”

“Now, we know there’s no guarantee—” began the chairman.

“Who wants to be an earthworm?” Gertrude demanded. “Who wants to be a dung beetle? Or worse—to be born with human cognition but have no opportunity to exercise it. On balance human suffering vastly outweighs the pleasures of human life, and we were all just lucky enough to end up where we did in our past lives. But who among you could go from college housing to the streets?”

“It makes no difference to the reincarnated,” said Professor Bent. “You would forget, you’d have no basis of comparison—”

“Not to mention forgetting!” Gertrude cried in triumph. “Why should we want our memories stripped clean? How is the Lethe different from death? Better to exist as we are, here, and now. We follow the example of the Morning Star. We make our own paradise in Hell—”

“All right, Milton,” said Professor Mansfield.

“God has no hold on us,” said Gertrude. “Morality is for the weak.”

“All right, Raskolnikov,” said Professor Bent.

“You may mock me all you like,” said Gertrude. “But I believe Raskolnikov didn’t take things far enough. His resolve wavers at the end.

His mistake is that he falters, he gets paranoid, he lets the policeman get in his mind. But imagine if he held on to his convictions! Imagine if the idiot Sonya, and all her Christian moralizing, never entered the picture—yes, imagine if guilt never got in his way . . .”

“Yes, we know, we’ve all read Nietzsche, God is dead and so forth,” said the chairman. “But unfortunately, some higher power decided we deserve some punishment, so here we are—”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way!” Gertrude slammed her palms on the table. “Why do we accept the courts of Hell? Why are we so comfortable in our situation? Don’t you see, if God is not already dead, then we must kill God. We must rebuild Hell to our own liking. We must make Dis our own paradise.”

“Why is she here?” Professor Bent demanded to the chairman. “This has nothing to do with my dissertation.”

“Impact has everything to do with a dissertation,” said Gertrude. “Why put out a piece of work, if you don’t know what you want it to accomplish?”

“We are here to discuss methodology,” said the chairman. “Not metaphysics.”

“Though it’s not like this piece could pass,” said the monocled Shade.

“We haven’t even gotten to the shaky autobiography—”

“Watch who you’re calling shaky,” said Professor Bent.

“You really think it was worth twelve pages discussing how your wife’s family wouldn’t pay for the wedding?”

“It’s better than your effort last week,” said Professor Bent. “All

grotesque and gore—”

“Detail matters.”

“Oh, sure, if you’re writing fiction—”

It escalated so quickly. One moment Professor Bent and the monocled Shade were shouting over the table; the next they were wrestling atop it.

Half the Shades stood to join the fray. The other half sat back, arms folded and scowling. Alice watched, mouth agape. She felt such a profound pity.

They cared so much, they argued so viciously, but couldn’t they see it didn’t

matter, didn’t even remotely register in the cosmic span of things, and that this was the dumbest possible way to spend eternity?

“Are you happy?” Gradus looked pleased as a cat. “Is it what you’d hoped?”

But Alice couldn’t imagine what victory he thought he’d gained.

“Look!” someone cried. “Look!”

ALL FACES TURNED TO THE WINDOW.

Lights appeared in the sky. To Alice’s eye they looked like stars— constellations of winking bursts that seemed so remote at first but then drew closer and closer, until they approached and she saw they were not stars at all but flakes of ember. Fires sprang to life everywhere they landed. The hawkers rushed about with mats, trying to smother the flames. But they were too late, and Alice heard howls as whole stacks of paper went up in smoke. She saw the woman who had been doing copyedits running around in circles shrieking with her head ablaze, the Strunk and White clutched against her chest.

Chairs screeched as the Shades stood up. They jostled past Alice in their hurry to get out the door. She watched them run, baffled. Several moments later, she saw them from the window, running with arms windmilling toward the flame.

“Oh!” Alice rushed forward several steps, then stopped herself, unsure of what, if anything, she could do. “Oh—someone stop them!”

But she had misinterpreted their cries as expressions of anguish. These Shades were delighted. They ran to the fire the way children would dash barefoot into an ocean. They raced toward the bazaar not to rescue their peers, or salvage the supplies, but to join in the fun.

They caught flame as quick as shriveled leaves. Alice could not tear her eyes off those burning faces. Ever since childhood she had been so afraid of fire. She used to imagine burning at the stake as the most horrible way one could go. Bubbling fat, the transmutation of flesh to charcoal—it frightened her so. But the souls in Dis did not wither. Their flesh did not slough off their cheeks, even as it sizzled. Beneath the flames their skin remained smooth, untouched. Burning here was not permanent. The only thing

manifest was the pain.

“Stop screaming,” said Gradus.

Alice had not realized she was. She touched her neck; her throat was hoarse. Her hand trembled. “Oh, why—”

“We cannot produce fire for ourselves,” said Gradus. “No one knows why, but it is the one thing Hell denies us. So we’re very happy when it comes from the sky. Don’t worry, it can’t hurt them. It’s only a memory.”

A hubbub erupted near the shore. A great shape burst through the city walls, scattering its marble foundations. Some howling, rumbling thing, too huge to be comprehended all at once. Alice could only register its attributes in pieces. Heavy footsteps. A hulking gait. The beast had three heads. The Shades cried out as if one. “Cerberus!”

They surged forth. Alice could not understand why they were approaching the beast, and yet they stood with their hands outstretched, waving with abandon. She reached without thinking for Gradus, though her fingers met only cold air. “Aren’t they scared?”

“Scared? Cerberus is the most exciting thing to happen down here.”

Gradus looked so pleased with himself. “We hope he will trample us. We

beg him to maul us.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s interesting,” said Gradus. “Pain is interesting, and you can bear anything as long as it’s interesting.”

“But how—”

“It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time. Time crawls here.

You do anything to feel.” He gave a start. “Oh! A direct hit!”

One of Cerberus’s heads shot down and grasped a Shade around the waist. The crowd along the shore cheered as Cerberus lifted the Shade into the air. Viscera splattered everywhere. Cerberus’s jaw moved, and dismembered pieces littered the sand. But he couldn’t have done that, thought Alice; the Shades had to bisect themselves, they had to want this. A great cheer went up around the courtyard, and Shades surged forth to

volunteer their bodies.

“Me next!”

“Me, Cerberus!”

“Me!”

Alice heard a high-pitched ringing in her head.

“My arm, Cerberus—rip it off!”

“My head—”

“My juicy guts!”

Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all. Oh, God, she thought frantically, why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars . . .

Only the Shade named Gertrude had not left the room. She stood still by the window, watching the proceeds with perfect calm. Alice felt a sort of horrified fascination with her, perhaps akin to the fascination schoolboys felt for their severe and pretty teachers.

“Pathetic, isn’t it?” asked Gertrude. “The things they do for

entertainment.”

“You don’t write,” said Alice.

“Oh, no. I refuse.”

Alice nodded to the shrieking bodies. “Then what makes you any different from them?”

“I don’t see reincarnation as the answer,” said Gertrude. “I see reincarnation as the escape. Escape for weaker wills who cannot face their new world with resolve, who cannot understand that this is it, this is all we have.” Gertrude turned away from the window. Her harsh eyes met Alice’s own, and a shiver ran up Alice’s spine. “May I show you?”

“Leave her be,” said Gradus. “No one’s interested in your cult.”

“We must all decide for ourselves, Gradus.”

“What cult?” Alice asked.

“A fellowship,” Gertrude clarified. “Come freely, leave freely.”

“That isn’t true.”

“You left, did you not?”

“Alice,” Gradus said urgently. “Trust me.”

Alice tilted her head. “But why would I do that?”

Gertrude was a question mark. Meanwhile Gradus had brought her into Dis to mock and disturb her. She had no reason to trust either of them, but between them, Gertrude had not yet laughed at her despair.

Alice could have blamed her choice on reason then. Professor Grimes might be with Gertrude, indeed was probably with Gertrude. Certainly she would not lump him in with those screaming Shades. But it was impulse above all else; impulse and curiosity, to see the final refuge of sinners.

“Why, Gradus.” Gertrude cocked her head, and her voice was a velvet threat. “Who is she to you?”

For a moment Alice feared Gradus might reveal she was not dead. But his face blanked. His grayness wrapped around him like a shawl, and he made no response.

Gertrude extended her hand to Alice. Alice reached for it, then hesitated.

“Where are you taking me?”

Gertrude nodded to the wall. There was a wooden door Alice had not seen before. Gertrude pulled it open, revealing a tiny, spiraling set of stairs.

Alice could not tell where they led, or how high they reached; only that the narrow stone steps curled into darkness.

“Into the Rebel Citadel,” said Gertrude. “Into the way out.”

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