Katabasis — Chapter no 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Gertrude glided, and Alice followed. During the Italy tour Alice had climbed the steps of the Duomo in Florence, a dreadful idea in the dead of summer, four hundred and sixty-three steps in suffocating heat that she counted one by one in her head, because nothing else in that dim, unventilated, claustrophobic spiral gave her any reason to continue. One woman suffered something resembling a heart attack halfway up, and the rest of them had to press themselves tight against the wall as she and her husband shuffled, gasping, back down. Once every hundred stairs there was a tiny window in the stone, and everyone pressed their face against the bars as they walked past, desperate for a breeze.

Alice could only assume the architect of Dis had been inspired by the Duomo. But the interstitial windows here afforded no cool air, only small rectangles of Hell’s burnt-orange sky. Her legs burned; her lungs could not get enough air. She turned all her efforts on putting one foot in front of another, on ignoring how many there had been and how many there were to go. At last, just as she feared she might faint, they emerged into a courtyard.

For a moment Alice thought they had ascended into the living world, for what she saw here mirrored the splendor of Rome, of the Villa Borghese, of Palatine Hill. These were not ruins, not scattered artifacts fallen through the cracks between worlds, but coherent, elegant designs. Tiled footpaths arced around sculptures, gazebos, and burbling fountains. Alice breathed deep, and the air that filled her lungs was crisp, fresh, and sweet.

“Come along, my dear.” Gertrude gestured for Alice to follow her up the hill. They reached a terrace lined by statues upon plinths. A dozen men and women, much larger than life size.

“The greatest among us,” said Gertrude. “Our builders and dreamers.

Magicians, architects, and poets among them. All finely attuned to beauty, and convinced that beauty could be torn away from the divine.”

Alice tried to guess at the identities of these figures, but there were no names on the plinths, and the chiseled faces were strangely impersonal.

They evoked ideals more than they did particular people. Uniform strong

brows, eyes lifted upward, straight patrician noses. Mouths set in heroic,

defiant frowns.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Still with us,” said Gertrude. “This is the Rebel Citadel. We lose no one to death.”

They walked across the terrace to an overhang. Alice leaned over the edge. She could see all of Dis below—the bazaar, the workshops, the milling interlocutors. The city was so much larger than she’d imagined. The bazaar—still burning, wrecked by Cerberus’s rampage—seemed to be only one small pocket of many such marketplaces. From here she could see a whole teeming mass of Shades, running about the city like ants, all dedicated to the same pointless task. She stepped back. It felt good to escape above, free of the noise. If only she kept away from the edge, she could block the bazaar entirely from view. From this terrace, the rest of Dis

might as well not exist.

“It’s lovely here,” she said.

“Isn’t it?” Gertrude beckoned. “Come over round this way. The view is better here.”

They turned a corner. Alice saw that they stood on not a mountaintop but a cliffside. Below churned the Lethe, black and merciless. Here it was more agitated than Alice had ever seen it, slamming furiously against the rocks below. Here more than anywhere else the Lethe seemed not a river but an ocean, a vast black expanse that surrounded them on all sides. She looked out to the horizon, wondering—but she saw nothing there. King Yama’s domain remained out of sight.

“We built on the water’s edge,” said Gertrude. “The greatest rebuke.”

Proudly she surveyed her domain. Alice followed her gaze, marveling at that complex silhouette, those towers reaching defiantly for the sky. At the highest peak overlooking the Lethe, where all patterns suggested there should have been a bell tower, was a jagged, incomplete edge.

“There was a quake,” said Gertrude.

“A quake?”

“Every now and then the land rebels,” said Gertrude. “The earth is rent apart. Chasms open beneath our feat. Lava spews from beneath and sloughs off our skin, encases us in rock. Those who fall below take eons to climb

out, if ever they do.”

“Oh,” said Alice.

“Once there was a most terrible quake, and the bell tower fell.”

Gertrude shook her head. “Such a calamity. We watched it tumble down the rocks, ringing the whole time, and sink beneath the waves. Still sometimes we hear a low note, humming in our bones, and we know it is the bell ringing from beneath the Lethe, ringing still.”

She said this with no sense of loss.

Alice could guess why. “There will be another bell. You will build another bell.”

“Oh, yes,” said Gertrude. “Everything ends up in Hell eventually.

Everything finds its way to Dis. Souls go round and round. But all their stuff—that doesn’t get a second life. In time we will scavenge enough to build a second world below. Not a replica. No one wants a replica of a flawed world. We are building something better.”

For a moment Alice saw what Gertrude saw, looking over that skyline— a great city just becoming, to be filled out and completed over one millennium and then another. Gertrude spoke as one who had the time; whose existence was not counted in days but in eras; whose project could be measured in one long breath from the birth of the world to its end. Alice saw flashing in her mind all the outlines of cities that had come before the citadel. Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Xi’an—all the great centers of the world, places the Rebel Citadel had outlasted. She tried to imagine Dis from that long view of time. Perhaps in time Dis would grow so large, so hospitable, that no souls would ever cross over. Why toil, when you could rest in peace?

Gertrude turned to the horizon. In the burning light, her profile was quite striking. Her right hand was lifted up to her chest, palm open in beneficence. Alice had gravely mistaken her for a heretic. Up here, Gertrude occupied more the role of a saint.

“Have you ever watched sand falling through an hourglass?” asked Gertrude. “Imagine it now, in your mind’s eye. Pay attention to what happens at the bottom. Always the sand forms a little peak. A mountain, reaching. Then the weight becomes too great, and the sand collapses outward, and the bottom flattens again. Time doesn’t build to a climax, you see. Only a little peak, always about to collapse. That is how time moves here in Dis. Tiny impulses forward, the illusion of a build. Then the cycle repeats, again and again, while all the time the bottom accumulates. One day we will reach the top. But it takes so very long.”

She lifted her chin. “We will be here at the end. We will be here when the dying sun goes out. When the armies of Gog and Magog assemble to invade the saints of Heaven, when Fenrir swallows Odin whole, when Apep devours Ra and casts all in darkness, when the world turns upside down and its crust is cast into molten rock to be reborn anew, we will be here.”

She spoke with such conviction.

Alice wondered what it took to sustain that hope across years, across centuries. Then she wondered where to locate the flaw in Gertrude’s thinking. Was there one at all? For in a world where none of the rules were stable, why not believe in an apocalyptic reversal of the moral order? Why was that so unlikely? Wasn’t there a perverse beauty to it all? What conviction—to do wrong and stand by it—how much bolder it was than to do right simply because one was afraid. Just then Alice envied Gertrude. At least Gertrude knew what she stood for. At least Gertrude had a future to fight for, faraway as it was.

“And I can just . . .” Alice spread her hands, unsure how to comport herself. “You mean that I can just stay here?”

“Stay as long as you like,” said Gertrude. “Stay forever.”

“And no one else can get in?”

She was thinking of the Kripkes, but Gertrude took her to mean John Gradus. “That charlatan? He won’t bother you. Nothing enters the citadel

without my knowledge.”

“And should I want to leave?”

“I will not force you to stay. No one comes to the citadel except by free will. But I think you will be much more comfortable here than you ever could have been outside.” Gently, Gertrude pressed her hand against Alice’s back. “Go on. The city is yours.”

This seemed rather abrupt to Alice. She did not know what more fanfare she could have wanted—Gertrude had delivered precisely what she had promised—but she had not expected such a quick dismissal.

“But where is everyone?”

“Resting. People come to the citadel for the quiet. We do not squabble like those down below. Wander as you like, but in time you will find you prefer the quiet as well.”

Alice felt a twinge of panic. She did not want to be all alone here; she didn’t know what to do with herself. “But where are you going?”

“To mind the city.” Gertrude gave Alice’s shoulder a firm, final press.

“Go now. Find your peace.”

SO ALICE WANDERED DOWN THE MARBLE path, feeling a bit like a child told, before the sun was even down, to go to bed.

She spent a while peering at the statues, but their smooth perfection got boring in short order. They were only inspiring from a distance; up close, all their faces looked the same. Florence had been fascinating in a way this place was not, she thought. Florence was textured. Nothing here had history. Nothing was cracked or rubbed shiny with time. It was all built and repaired and maintained constantly so that eternity somehow looked merely a decade old.

She felt a bit let down, if she was being honest. The name Rebel Citadel promised something more—ideally, something rebellious—but mostly it just seemed quiet. Where were the Lucifers?

She wandered further along the silent path, mildly curious to see where she would end up. She could not grasp the citadel’s design. It was not a spiral or a beehive or a simple spread on the hill, but somehow all three of those at once. It curved in on itself; the same paths that crawled down its inside also looped around its outside. Several times she passed along dark, high walls, convinced she was down deep in the city’s bowels, only to pop out unexpectedly onto a terrace. Outside, from all angles, the citadel seemed empty and idyllic—so then where were its secrets? Alice fixed herself an arbitrary principle—turn always toward the darkness—and this led her to a dense maze of squares that quite resembled the walled-in matrix of alleys and campos of Venice. She turned a corner into what looked like a courtyard, and saw in the dim light the most incredible thing.

Growth. A root. A branch.

Alice’s heart leapt. A True Contradiction, Elspeth had named it.

Something growing in the land where there can be no new life. Was this the secret to their confidence? Could the Rebel Citadel have grown its own Dialetheia?

But this branch didn’t look like how the archives said. The archives promised a dazzling bloom, a vitality that shouldn’t be. But this branch was a withered, black-brown thing, extending limply from a dried-out bush.

When Alice touched it with her fingertip, it shrank away like a worm from salt.

She thought she heard a voice in the dark. But it was so faint, a feeling more than a word. Something like No, go away, leave me be.

“What on earth?” she murmured.

She touched the branch again. And though the branch shrank back further, Alice heard the sound more definitely this time—a coherent voice now, a word she could just barely make out, if she could decipher its language. She held her finger against the branch, and a whorl of whispers seeped through the air.

She strained her ears. Please let it be a ghost, she thought, please give me some company, anyone at all. But whenever she tried to seize on one strand, to decipher its train of thought, it dissipated back into the mass. All she could make out was a general air of hostility. The branch did not want her there. The bush wanted to be left alone. But Alice was too curious to leave things be.

She moved fast this time, and succeeded in grasping the tendrils in her palm. The whispers grew louder. She knew it was foolish, but she simply had to know, with sick fascination, what would happen if she grasped a

branch and simply— Crack.

The branch snapped in her hand. The bush shrank back, all its whispers crying out at once. They were not loud cries, but so dearly pathetic.

Why would you do that, they cried. Why would you ever do that?

Alice glanced to her palm. The branch was a branch no longer, but an ugly twisted thing. She dropped it. It shriveled and crumbled into dust, and in the bushes where she’d broken it a shiny tip was exposed to air, gleaming with something darker than blood. A whisper of smoke curled around that wound, the same gray of a Shade’s essence.

Alice ventured deeper into the campo, and saw row upon row of bushes and trees—a whole garden, interlacing thorns and twisted branches and

mulch. She moaned. “All of you?”

“Not so loud!”

Alice jumped.

It was the knob at her knee that spoke; an ugly, lumpy growth in the side of a blackened tree. She could personify that stump, if she tilted her head just the right way. A rustle, a groan, and suddenly it became the turtle-

like head of a toothless old man. He nipped at her fingers. Alice yanked her hand back, and the knob cackled.

“Playing. Only playing. Don’t startle, love.”

Alice folded her arms tight across her chest.

“Are you new here?” the knob inquired.

“Clearly, yes.”

“Why don’t you sit down over there,” said the knob. “He’s new, too.”

Alice turned to where the knob gestured. A stone bench lined the path.

But she didn’t see anyone else, only more undergrowth.

“Who?”

“I’m not sure about his name. We don’t have much use for names.”

Alice took a second glance at the undergrowth and saw that the cluster of greenery on the edge looked younger and greener than the rest. The leaves were small and tender. The branches hadn’t yet grown thorns.

“Why don’t you sit,” said the knob again.

Alice perched gingerly at the edge of the bench. “But what do I do

now?”

“Why,” said the knob, “now you rest.”

Alice crossed her ankles, then uncrossed them. She felt oddly self- conscious. She half expected leaves to start budding on her own limbs, but nothing happened. “You mean, like this?”

“However you like.” The knob shrank back against its stump. “Only

settle down, and rest.”

“Rest how?”

“Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your

consciousness and let go.”

“And then I’ll turn into a tree?”

“You’ll take root,” said the knob. “You’ll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.”

Alice’s chest felt tight. The groves were too still, too silent. There was something terrible about leaves with no rustle, stones with no sound of water. A courtyard needed wind. She felt dread trickling in her stomach. She tried to ignore this; tried to remind herself that she should be at peace now, that nothing and no one could hurt her. But of course this was the wrong thing to think. For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the

greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.

A great pressure built up in the back of her skull; bottled-up memories, demanding release. Now hear the screams. Now taste the metal. Now feel the blood, enormous volumes of it, smearing her eyes, salting her tongue.

She had never imagined the human body contained so much blood.

Professor Grimes’s panic—the way he spun toward her, the reproach in his eyes, the way he knew— Knew what? After all this time, she still could not make a coherent narrative from the mess, could not sort those impressions into a structured story that offered any clarity about what she had done and what she owed.

Here was the Gordian knot: her memories were perfect, but she could only sort through impressions as they had first occurred to her. And the day of Professor Grimes’s death was so jumbled and confused that, months later, and after a million times of reviewing the evidence, she still had no idea what to think. Certainly she hated him. Certainly in the weeks before the accident she had often looked into his face—that crevassed, savage, handsome thing—and fantasized about smashing it apart so it no longer had value, could not enchant. Was that killing intent? Was intent enough? But she didn’t want him dead. She never wanted him dead. She only wanted him to feel a shred of what she felt, only so that he would understand—only so he wouldn’t look down on her so. And she remembered gazing at him and not wishing he were gone, but that things could go back to normal; that she could keep dancing on the line, flirting with danger, have her cake, eat it too.

She could not define her guilt. All she had was fragments, and these she went over compulsively. The whoosh in her mind when she entered the lab that day. How his voice alone made her dizzy. Don’t look at me, she had thought; forget I am here. Her shaking hand, the chalk wobbly in her grasp.

A broken white line. She saw it, she saw it clearly, otherwise she wouldn’t have this memory; she saw the gap between one statement and the next, and she didn’t do anything about it. But did it register? Did she know what it meant to ignore it? She saw the gap, she blinked, she stood up, she said they were ready to go. Alice ran this sequence back in her mind a thousand times over but each time it offered no answers, only a building urge; a screaming desire—for what? A confession, a correction, something—something had to

change, something had to give; she could not go on under these conditions.

She fidgeted. The groves hissed, and Alice strained not to scream.

Settle, whispered the forest. Settle, settle— “I can’t,” she gasped.

Just try, whispered the forest. Hold your thoughts at arm’s length, and go—empty.

An impossible task. They might as well have asked her to retrieve the moon.

She knew very well how hard it was to dull your own mind. The radio blared at all hours. You could not turn it off. You smashed it, and it screamed louder. Most times, all you could do was manage the pain. In the past year Alice had learned a million and one tricks for distracting her mind from wanting to die. Rituals helped. Keeping herself busy helped. She was not one of the depressives who lay stinking in bed; she could not just lie there, the stillness hurt worse. Moving staved the agony. Laundry day was wonderful because that was at least two hours of guaranteed distraction, of tasks she absolutely needed to do. So too was grading day, when she could take her stack of tests to the pub and lose herself in the rote activity of checking, circling, calculating, and scrawling marks at the top. The trick, in those days, was to cram her mind with as many thoughts as possible to keep the memories at bay. At home alone, she read everything within reach. She did tasks one-handed so she could hold something to her face with the other. Shampoo bottle instructions. Canned soup nutritional information.

She pored a million times over the newspaper while mindlessly chewing her cereal. She kept the grainy television set on at all hours in the lounge, and if her housemates were bothered at least they left her alone. Doctor Who went on trial. Ringo Starr played with toy trains. This did not dissuade the bad thoughts. They were always playing in the forefront, in bright colors, on full volume. The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to full volume as well, so that the airwaves canceled each other out, and the cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.

But it all made her so tired. You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another. It wrung you out, stretched your mind thin. She did not have a tolerance for repetition. Somewhere buried there was the deep, curious spark that rebelled at boredom, which longed to be

productive, or at least engaged with the world. Only that spark was too dulled now to do much more than hurt.

She had tried meditation. It was all the rage on campus those days; you couldn’t cross the street without glimpsing a New Age poster promising enlightenment, transcendental out-of-body experiences. Alice had been desperate; she had tried everything. She had sat cross-legged on strangers’ carpets and hummed and remained for hours in perfect stillness, chasing that promised calm, trying not to hate everyone in the room, trying to believe the lie.

She tried those methods again now, because she wanted what the forest promised. She wanted to be good for the knob. She squeezed her eyes shut.

She slowed her breathing. She summoned the image of a candle flame—all the Cambridge yogis had mentioned a candle flame; warm and happy, the fire of life—and focused all her attention on keeping the flickering at the fore, and that heap of broken images dimly in the back.

She couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Five minutes, ten, twenty, an hour. But then it didn’t matter, did it? There was no end point, it didn’t count for anything. She could reach a state of transcendental calm and it would still count for nothing. When she woke up a hundred years might have passed, and there would still be a hundred years to go, and a hundred more after that. This bargain was terrible. All that effort, and no reward.

A crystal shattered in her mind. The illusion could not hold; impatience exploded; a million ants crawling over her skin.

“Oh,” she cried, “I can’t stand it, I can’t be here—”

“Yes you can,” said the knob. “Try, try . . .”

“I’ve tried.”

“Try harder. It will come. You will calm.”

“But how do you know?”

She was aware of how childish she sounded, but at that moment she did feel a childish need for the simplest answers. If only someone would tell her she would be all right. If only someone would show her the way.

“Because you’re not the first.”

The knob creaked back, and Alice followed its gaze down the groves clustered in all corners of the campo: all up the side streets and up the walls, trailing out of windows. Dense forestry crowded the inner streets of the Rebel Citadel for as far as Alice could see.

“They come in agony,” said the knob. “They come with their regrets and confessions. They come in shame, and with a great urge to make things right. They stand in the squares and fret like you are now, until they learn the calm of stony places, and they become part of the grove.”

“And now they’re asleep?” Alice asked.

“Close,” said the knob. “Sleep doesn’t come, not here. But close your eyes, still your mind, and you get something close . . .”

“But what if I can’t?”

“Then seek the monasteries.”

“The monasteries?”

“Across the way,” said the knob. “In the shade lie the trees. Along the cliffs, the abbeys . . .”

Alice had thought the citadel was emptied, still. But where the knob gestured, inside the walls along the cliffs, she saw Shades in congregation.

No great movement, but a kind of stirring; rhythmic, circular. Souls pacing in place. Souls chanting in unison. That was the buzzing, she realized; not bees, but psalms.

“Psalms at Terce,” said the knob. “Prayers at Nones, prayers at Vespers.

In all other hours, prayers and meditation . . .”

“Praying to what?”

“They pray to the act,” said the knob. “They pray to waiting, for the strength to be patient until the end. Until the world turns upside down. Until the Lethe runs dry, and the domain of Lord Yama turns in on itself. For nothing is eternal, not even the order of this universe, and one day the eight courts will fold in on themselves and the meaning of being itself will change. They believe that souls cannot be purified by retribution, or reformation, but only by the fires of time. That the kālavāda, the school of time, holds all answers to the cryptic idiocies of Hell.”

This response was so disappointing, Alice nearly wept. “So they’re waiting for nothing.”

“Do they not have good reason to wait?” asked the knob. “Every religion supplies an origin of the universe. Every tale has a beginning.

Every beginning implies an end. The one became a million which will diminish to one again. The fires of Ragnarok will split the earth and birth it anew. Even Father Time is not infinite; even he will be slain.”

“So what?” Alice cried. “They think they’ll survive that? The apocalypse?”

“Nothing will survive the apocalypse,” said the knob. “But it takes away the necessity of choice. They do not move on. They do not die. They only wait. They await the turning of the sands. A new world, and a newer world after that. Worlds you could not imagine, with laws utterly unlike our own.

Worlds where entropy runs in the other direction, and time proceeds toward order. Worlds where men fly, and birds are tied to the ground. Worlds where chance does not exist, and the future is a solid, steady block. Worlds without pain and suffering, worlds without subjectivity, worlds of beauty, worlds worth dreaming for . . .”

Perhaps, thought Alice; but this was a game not of millennia, but orders of magnitude even above that. And before that new world came, their world had to die, and everything in it. Nothing here would survive the turning of the sands. These souls would not perceive the future.

It pained her more and more to look at this forest, all this vegetation that had given up and was content now to barely be. She thought to all the hours she had ever wasted in her life; all the minutes she had watched count down on the clock, waiting for them to go faster. Whole days she had spent confined to her room like a prisoner, sitting blankly on her chair, anticipating the ritual marks that proved time was going by: meals she didn’t eat; prayers she didn’t attend; the bells at all hours, reminding students it was time to get going. She’d been so relieved to sleep; so disappointed to wake. Back then every hour that slipped by her seemed like a tiny victory. But why had she been so eager for that time to disappear?

What was that countdown to?

At least in the world above she had the slimmest hope that something in her condition might change, that one day she would wake up and feel right again, that a door would open up; a solution would present itself. Here that countdown led nowhere at all. Change was foreclosed. Here all events were just little piles in the hourglass; reaching, then collapsing, over and over again.

The garden seemed so dead and cold then. That wasn’t green. Just the memory thereof. Just a cruel imitation.

And Alice realized with terrible clarity that this was the worst punishment of the citadel, of Hell itself. This punishment they had wrought themselves. If Aristotle and Leibniz were right, and time was just change, then time was done for them. But not for everyone else. They still had to feel it, chronicity with no telos. And to be placed outside of time—denied

everything that moved in cycles, birthing and growing and aging and dying; denied ancestors and descendants; denied any place in the tree—while at once forced to feel every inch of its slow, inexorable progress—God, but this was horrific! Stumps only, dead ends with diminishing echoes of their short mortal loops. Immortality here was no gift. Nothing was fleeting, precious, and so nothing was valuable. Not even thoughts, for none of their thoughts were original, but mere echoes of one another, everything they would ever be capable of thinking in a gilded box with the spotlight merely roving. Nothing added; no discovery, no delight. No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.

Suddenly the campo seemed to shrink around her. Alice had a vision of sinking into that grove; of receding further and further into the settled souls until black branches closed over her face. She felt a swell of panic, and this made her want to yank at the branches, smack at the leaves, set the whole thing on fire, just to make it stir. Oh, to make it scream!

“Well then,” she snapped, “if you’re not waiting for anything except the end of the world, then why don’t you just die?”

At this, a cluster of branches beside her made a low keening noise. Alice felt a stirring in the bush. Something solidified, pressing against her shoulder. She saw a silhouette that hadn’t been there before. The slope of a forehead; the mass of a chest.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said the knob. “You’ve woken him up.”

Alice didn’t understand why the knob was so peeved. It could only be a good thing that this Shade would shrug off the forest. It was a miracle, in fact, that after a hundred years, anything here could summon the subjectivity to return from plant to person.

“Hello,” she said.

The undergrowth exhaled in response.

The whole bush quivered, seemed to scrunch itself up, and then with a ripping noise the Shade tore himself free of his surrounding bush. He stood.

He was quite tall; a great, hulking mass, all his extremities still ending in branches. His face was a gray blur but took on finer distinction with every passing second. An uneven slope of a mouth emerged from the haze. A nose. Two bright, blinking eyes.

“Settle down,” the knob told him. “Settle, won’t you—”

The Shade took a wobbly step. The whole of him lurched, but he kept on his feet.

“Settle down,” repeated the knob, more urgently this time. “Now, let’s think about what we’re doing—”

The Shade strode with purpose down the path.

“Hold on.” Alice hurried after him. “Where are you—”

The Shade began to run. Alice followed after him, curious. The Shade went down a path and turned a corner. Suddenly the forest ended, and the shore lay open beneath them.

“No—” cried Alice, but it was too late. The Shade sprinted off the cliff and, for a single, weightless moment, was suspended in the air. Then the Lethe imposed its gravity. Some eddy opened, beckoning, and the Shade

swirled down.

She had to look.

The Shade landed facedown and did not resist. For several seconds he floated atop the waters, and then parts of him began melting into the current —bright, swirling colors that unfurled in long, thick streaks. Alice had visions of a jellyfish, a parachute, a magician’s scarf; so many colors emerging from a single point, an endless fount of memories stretching to ten feet, twenty; a cartoon strip of a life laid out for anyone to see, and she was beginning to wonder just how much territory it could cover until at last it all mixed and blurred, then dissolved into the beating black. Then the obsidian face of the Lethe was just as before. Swallowing all, releasing

nothing.

Vertigo hit. Alice swayed.

Two contradictory impulses swirled inside her then.

First, a vicious pang of jealousy at the completeness—at that mad swirl of colors that was finally, mercifully, allowed to dim.

Second, only now did she learn how badly she did not want to die.

She teetered over the edge, and a howling rush came up at her; a violent invisible force that left her skull spinning, her knees weak. Not me, she thought; not me, not now, not yet, not like this. Blood thundered in her ears, and did not let up until she staggered back to safety.

She swayed and turned away. She found all the trees of the citadel were bent toward her. All the malice of countless souls focused on a single point.

In a single voice they said, Thorn.

Alice ran.

She did not want to go toward the forest but she had to get away from the cliffs, and this left only the paved path through the campo’s center. The

grove howled and gathered around her—leaves reaching, branches curling.

The whole orchard moaned and contracted. So many faces emerged from the leaves; mouths yawning, eyes blinking open, necks creaking in her direction. What saved Alice was its inertia. There was no real animosity in that forest. The forest had trained so long to feel nothing that it had forgotten how to hate. The forest did not care much about Alice at all except that, like a lazy waking organism, it had identified the source of its discomfort and tried with every degree of movement it had to scratch her away. Tendrils stretched, but Alice batted them back. She broke free of the courtyard and raced down the marble path. She was faintly aware of Gertrude shrieking above her but did not stop to look. She dashed across the terrace, past the statues and fountains, and back into the narrow staircase.

The light dimmed; she had no sense of where she was, only that her feet were still pounding the steps, and that she was headed down, down, down.

She broke out onto the ground floor. The entry was transformed. No wooden door. Only a block of solid stone now—an impossible cell, with no doors, no windows, no way out. Gertrude had lied, and Alice was trapped in Dis.

But this was an old trick! Alice reached the wall, saw its smooth construction, and nearly screeched with laughter. If magicians had built this place, then magicians were still telling the same joke. She knew exactly how it went, could recite it in the exact cadence of a first-year telling it for the first time at the pub. Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language. What are doors and windows?

“Doors and windows keep you in,” Alice breathed, and raced forward without stopping. She did not even need to draw a pentagram for this, the illusion was so flimsy. She had been through it many times before; she had seen this trick at the entrance to her own department. “Doors and windows can be shut. There are no doors and windows, and so the way is not shut,

and so there’s nothing in my way.”

It worked.

Lord have mercy, it worked. The walls pressed in dark for just a moment, a single terrifying moment where Alice felt squeezed between the marble before her and the reaching grove behind. Then she broke through into the overbright courtyard, and even that hot, stale air was a wonderful relief.

She did not stop there. She ran past the bazaar, past the hawkers and skeptics and believers. Past Laplace’s Demon and the shredded manuscripts. Past howling Cerberus and the bodies in his wake; past those great gates, for there was no guard on the inside, and the doors swung easily open when she pushed. She passed the laughing Parmenides, who screeched behind her, asking if she’d gotten what she came for; she ran away from Dis until the city was a dwindling point on the horizon, away from the Lethe until the shore was long faded from sight. She ran until she was alone again on the dunes, under the low-burning sun amidst bleached-white bones, far from the comfort of human structure, from anything that remotely resembled the world above; back into the waste land where the only force that gave sense to anything was her own deteriorating thoughts.

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