Katabasis — Chapter no 29

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Now Alice was properly lost.

She could not find the Lethe. She had lost sight of it as she ran, and now no matter which direction she turned, she could not find it. She could not see its faint black outline on the horizon, nor hear its waves crashing against the rocks. Until now Hell had been always bounded at least on one side, and now it was not. No matter which map was right—Peter’s spiral/pizza/anus, her linear progressive map—the Lethe was the only limit on infinity. And in both Euclidean and hyperbolic space, a line that once intersected another would never intersect it again.

When she considered the implication of this, the bottom fell out of her stomach. If she never found the Lethe again, she might just trek deeper into

infinity forever.

Oh, dear.

She had no landmarks. She could not find the citadel. She could not find Dis. The terrain was confounding, and seemed deliberately so. The land taunted her. The grounds shifted far more rapidly than the earlier courts, and every time she glanced up she was somewhere new. A ring of cacti became a ring of rocks; a hill in the distance became, at second glance, a valley. At the very least she thought she was not walking in circles, for she came across no familiar landmarks—but the desert-scape re-formed itself so often that even if she was spinning in place, she might not even know.

But what was there to do but trek?

She would not die. She would not fade away, passive, listless, into the black. She knew this much. But that was all she knew. She needed that fact to matter, but she didn’t have the reasons why at hand. Only the inkling of an idea. An impulse really. An open question, a fumbling in the dark. That was enough to keep going. It had to be.

We are searching, she told herself. And we will know what we are searching for, when we find it.

Time slipped by. She stopped counting the days. She lost track of the sun, the moon. She suspected the moon had disappeared; whenever she

searched the sky, she couldn’t find it. She found she didn’t get hungry or thirsty anymore. When she did eat she felt nourished, but otherwise, her body felt theoretical. Her metabolism must have slowed; she hardly registered her need. Perhaps her body was stilling to match the rhythm of Hell, where change was counted in not hours but ages. In her mind’s eye she saw herself whittled down until she was hard and gleaming like the incomprehensible skeletons that littered the plane.

Here was a riddle: If nothing lived in Hell, then how was it that bones were stripped bare? For it was hawks and buzzards, nibbling crawling bugs, that made skeletons gleam so on earth. Death was scrubbed clean because life went on; rot and decomposition were growth; the cycles begot one another, so how did death polish itself in these wastelands, where time stood still? Boundaries are porous, she thought. That must be it; the only explanation. Life seeped in, even here at its antithesis; life made death beautiful, and kept the circle going.

But the implications of this were profound! This meant there were no absolutes, if even death itself was not an absolute. Peter and Gödel were right, she thought. The universe is incomplete, and I am one of their moving exceptions. But what does the fact of me prove, except that I am here?

As she wandered deeper into the desert she began uncovering the strangest things. Bookcases half buried in the sand. Books in languages she had never encountered. Metal bars—silver, bronze, gold tools—curved into shapes she had never seen and could not imagine a use for. Dentistry implements? Torture devices? Or evidence of another civilization; something ancient even to the Sumerians, the Mesopotamians? It was quite incredible. These artifacts matched absolutely nothing in her memory bank, set off no associations. This was new. This sparked a dull curiosity in her; the embers of the fire of discovery that had once guided her every decision.

She might have stopped to study them. She might have been the first chthonic anthropologist. But she wouldn’t have known where to start— these were texts that she couldn’t decipher; markings she couldn’t even identify.

She recalled another theory she had read of Hell; this one from a Mahayana Buddhist text, which held that the world itself moved through cycles of life, death, and rebirth just as humans did. The world hurtled through the stages of civilization until humans burned themselves out, and everything fell in cataclysm—through climate change, or world war, or any

variety of planetary destruction that turned all that vibrant life into gray silt.

And that became the resting place for all souls, from the beginning of time until now, until a spark of life formed on the other side—and the seeds of life began to sprout. So the world kept shifting and tilting like a great coin, souls spilling over from one side to another. Perhaps Gertrude and her ilk did have some reason to hope, then. Perhaps Hell was indeed not eternal; perhaps the sands would shift and the souls in Dis would emerge masters of some world.

But before that moment came—a millennium had passed, and how many more millennia to go?

Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and emerged only when he’d resisted Satan’s temptations. Here Alice found nothing quite so clarifying.

She passed no test. She was bored and desperate and ready to give it all up, and she was sure that the moment some demon offered any way out she would accept. Let me return to the citadel, she thought; give me a cell in Desire, a carrell in Pride.

The desert did not purify or improve her. It taught her nothing—except that the loneliness, the sheer expanse, made her rebuild and reinforce herself, like an insistent castle on shifting sands. One sought structure in the flow. One needed repetition, a pounding sound. I am still here. I think, therefore I am. I am Alice Law, I am a postgraduate at Cambridge, I study analytic magick . . . she really did need to reinforce these things, because the sheer, flat wash threatened to erode her sense of self until she was just swimming in a bath of unstructured memories. Faces here; feelings there; but what did it all build up to? Who did those recollections make?

The strangest effect of all this was that her memories stopped bothering her so much. Her skull no longer felt so painfully tight. Instead her thoughts were given space and time to spill outward; a flow from which she could step outside, pick and choose. The awful stuff was still there, but it was easier somehow to let it just—slide through her fingers. She had now some way to sort those memories; some coherent narrative built on the most basic premises, which she repeated over and over in her head, so as to remember

she was human at all.

My name is Alice Law.

Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not.

I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others.

Sooner or later I will die.

But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.

ONCE SHE HEARD SKITTERING BEHIND HER and her heart nearly dropped out from fear. But she turned and saw it was only a poor lurching animal. A leopard or wolf or coyote, she could not tell in the dim light—some thing composed of hide and bones that seemed on the point of death but not quite there yet. All sorts of things make their way down to Hell, Elspeth had told them. People and animals and forgotten things.

She decided it was some sort of large cat. She could only guess, for its fur was so dirty and matted, its head and ears mangled with sores. But its eyes gleamed a bright green, pupils narrowed to thin black slits. She thought she remembered from freshman biology that only cats could manage such an eerie glare.

They regarded one another in silence, breathing. Alice watched the cat’s flanks laboring to expand, contract, expand. It was so very thin.

“Poor thing,” she murmured. “How did you get down here?”

The cat padded forward. She realized, belatedly, she ought be afraid; that under that matted fur and those jutting ribs still was a deadly predator that had clearly gone far too long without eating. Its jaws glistened; saliva dripped from yellow fangs. Borges had written once of a distant wildfire, colored the pink of a leopard’s gums. The cat was close enough now that Alice could see its raw wound of a mouth. She wondered if this was Borges’s leopard. Fire in a maw, ravenous flame.

Her fear was a dull, abstract thing. She simply could not summon any true panic at the thought of having her jugular ripped out, her blood spilling and sinking into the soft gray. It seemed an abstract proposal to her, and an aesthetically interesting one at that. Maul was such a meaty word, so visually suggestive. She had a guilty want to hurl herself into its fangs, and witness the subsequent slash and tear. She could not help it, the attraction was always there; she understood now the Shades that had run at Cerberus.

Still, she reasoned, Peter had not saved her for her to be eaten by a desiccated leopard.

She considered reaching for her rucksack but feared the sight of a knife might inspire the cat to attack. In any case, she didn’t care to take her chances against those fangs. She had Lethe water in her flask, but that would not help her here. The poor beast would not know to fear those

waters. Perhaps it had even drunk already, mistaking it for a clear stream— perhaps had lost all sense of self, its history, its pack and cubs; perhaps now knew only that it was very hungry, and could not get out of this place.

She stepped back. The cat stepped forward, keeping even the distance between them.

How soft those paws are, thought Alice; how delicately they press, leaving not even footprints on the silt. What I would give, to step with such grace.

They moved again, in tandem. Then again, and again. Step by step they moved along the sands, locked in their dance of apprehension. The cat did not pounce; Alice did not draw her knife. Still it seemed critical that she did not drop her gaze, for whenever her eyes slid the cat hunched forward, sniffing for any lapse in vigilance. So Alice kept her gaze as focused as she could while she moved, locked on the cat’s famished, bloodshot eyes. And because of this, she wasn’t looking when she stepped into the Kripkes’ trap.

Suddenly her foot wouldn’t move.

She knew the moment she stepped that she was trapped; recognized the congealing that spread through her limbs and up her body. It was a smaller trap, not nearly as complex as the endless puzzle that had kept her and Peter walking in circles for hours. But all the Kripkes’ work had a certain taint to it; the chalky taste of magick. She felt it thick and bitter in her throat.

The cat pranced closer, delighted.

Alice stood frozen, nearly blind with terror.

Make it quick, she prayed; rip my neck first, don’t make it hurt— Then the cat, too, was trapped—Alice saw, by its right paw, a line of chalk stretching around its tail. The cat cocked its head, puzzled, and sank back into a crouch to spring again. This time the trap redoubled. The cat yowled, pained and mystified, as all its kinetic energy went nowhere and ripped against its muscles instead.

Alice and the cat panted, staring at one another. Their faces were mere feet away from each other; the cat strained, desperately hungry, saliva dripping from its jaws onto the swallowing silt. Beneath its matted fur Alice could see the silhouette of the creature it once was; the strain of muscle against bone. What a waste, she thought; all that power, and nowhere to put it. Its eyes were enormous with panic; its pupils nearly disappeared into the green. Help me, it seemed to want to say; please, help me.

“I wish I could,” Alice breathed. “I’m sorry.”

Tucked into the sand between them lay a gleaming bird’s skull. Some invisible wind moved through the hollows of its eyes, and a low cuckoo’s croon floated across the sands. Come, come, it told the Kripkes. Your prey is here.

Alice noticed then the metal buckets lined up all around them, visible now inside the trap’s glamour. She heard a grinding noise above. She glanced up. A set of knives rose inch by inch into the air above them, suspended by some hidden set of pulleys. They reached their apex, then dangled back and forth in the air, calculating. The blades turned toward the cat.

Alice could guess the internal logic. The trap had weighed Alice’s life against the cat’s and decided the cat was worth more; was bigger, carried the most blood. The knives whistled down. It was not a clean slice. They didn’t chop, they gouged. Blood poured, but slowly, and the cat howled piteously, swirling around with claws reached out to Alice as if begging her to help it find release.

But Alice was gone, lost to screaming memories. All she could think of was Peter suffering the same fate; hung up upside down, his life bleeding away into those buckets. For a moment she couldn’t move, terrified as she was—her limbs were floating, distended; a bell-like ringing started at the base of her head and grew louder and louder until she felt her skull shaking with it, until she thought she might burst apart. Oh, if only she could just shatter, if only this would all end—but it kept going on and on, and the terror reached a screaming pitch.

The cat gurgled. Something had ruptured inside, and blood spilled out from between those fangs. The blood did not sink into the sand, but trickled by magick into those buckets; many hot, thick streams racing across the sand. The cat’s spine contorted. It hunched into a ball and then stretched out like a flat line, reaching across the sand. In Alice’s mind rose the idiotic comparison of Belinda’s Norwegian forest cat, a sweet thing named Dame Antonia, who could sprawl like a carpet twice her apparent length. Cats are liquid, she heard with Belinda’s tinkling laughter, and that tinkling grew louder concurrent with the cat’s piteous cries.

At last the buckets were full to brimming, and the cat lay still. There was a horrible grinding noise as the pulleys reset. This time the blades aimed for Alice.

“Think,” she gasped. The sound of her own voice—tinny, fragile, human—brought her back somewhat; rooted her in a sensation that wasn’t her own terror. “Think.”

She crouched low in the sand, scanning for any proof of the pentagram —and there it was, one corner untucked; one word peeking out from the glamour. Chelone. Greek for tortoise.

She made a noise that was half a laugh, half a scream. Zeno, of course.

She was frozen in her steps because the Kripkes had inscribed the first of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Achilles races a tortoise but gives him a head start. When Achilles catches up to where the tortoise once was, the tortoise has moved on; he catches up again, but again the tortoise has moved on; and so Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, and motion is physically impossible.

No one did Zeno anymore, Zeno was for freshers. Anyone who walked into an Introduction to Magick seminar knew already that space and time were not infinitely divisible in this way. But down here the Kripkes preyed on starving, senseless creatures. The Kripkes were getting lazy.

She had chalk. She needed blood. She stretched her arm toward the nearest bucket, but her fingers only grazed its side. She took a deep breath, then flung her arm out as far as it would go. Her finger snagged the bucket’s lip. She yanked back; the bucket tipped. Blood pooled over her fingers, soaked the chalk. And the cat’s blood was so rich and fresh, the chalk wrote so cleanly, it took her only seconds to write in mathematical language what amounted to the statement, But for calculus.

Her legs sprang free. Alice jumped and rolled to the side, just as the blades whistled down against nothing.

WHEN SHE CAME TO, WHEN HER panic ebbed and her pulse slowed, she was ravenous.

The beast’s blood did it. Its stench suffused the air; musky, salty, delicious. She crawled to her knees, and after she’d flung her fingers through the sand and defused the trap for good, she pressed her face against the corpse and moaned.

She couldn’t get enough of it. It wasn’t just the blood and lingering warmth; it was the sheer grossness of the corpse. She had not been around this much living viscera, the moist and squishy components of life, for so

long. Hell starved the senses. All was so clean and quiet down here, so sterile; but the cat’s stench was proof that life was messy, full of blood and guts and gristle. Decomposition meant life. She wanted to roll in that mess; she had the overwhelming urge to dump a bucket over her head, slather the blood all over her face and arms, and wrestle with the corpse until they were one.

Reason prevailed. She set to building a fire.

She had a handful of matches that were still dry, and her notebook pages made good kindling. In short order she had a roaring stable flame. She untied the Kripkes’ knives from their pulley and sawed into the cat’s side until she had several fistfuls of meat. She dug further, and found what looked like a heart and a liver. Organs are healthy, she’d once read; eat those first. All this she skewered on a knife and placed directly into the flames. Let it burn; she didn’t care. She wanted it messy; charcoal and blood and all. She couldn’t wait long enough for the meat to cook through anyway. Once the smell hit her nose her stomach screamed, and she saw herself in her mind’s eye with the same slavering glare the cat had once turned on her. She seized the meat. It burned her fingers; she didn’t notice.

The liver she ate quickly. It came apart soft in her teeth. The heart she chewed for a long time, relishing how sore it made her gums. Taste did not matter, she hardly registered it; all that mattered was that the chemicals in her gut could tell it was nutrient-rich biological matter and that it was good.

By then the rest of the meat had cooked, all enticing crackling fat, but Alice’s stomach roiled at the thought of stuffing more inside her. She lay on her back and stared at the sky in a daze.

What a trip.

She would have liked the luxury of having a mental breakdown but unfortunately, now time mattered again. She was hurled back into a schema of change and there was forward momentum now, a destination, things to do and get done. She had to busy herself with whatever happened several hours from now. Futurity! What a concept.

Once her senses came back a bit, she regarded the spread-out carcass.

She supposed she could have been more careful about butchering the meat —organs, blood, and flesh lay scattered across the sand, and at this stage she had a hard time telling what was what—but still she was able to salvage entire steaks from the cat’s sides and legs. She didn’t know the first thing about curing meat, but she figured cooked meat would last longer than raw.

Provisions for the future. A future. Incredible. She roasted the flesh using the knife as a skewer, staring intently as the crackling meat went from bright red to a hard black. The smell made her ravenous once more. She tore the meat into pieces and ate with gusto, licking fat from burnt fingers.

For the first time in a long while, she had a sense of her body. She felt its wants and pangs. She felt its strength. She turned her right hand over before her eyes and stared, astonished, at its ridges and veins. So many little grinding pieces composed this heaving lump of a machine. And miracle of all miracles, it worked.

She felt something else: a thrumming roar deep in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t quite describe it. It was not a sensation she had ever felt before; indeed the intensity of it rather scared her. But that moment, all Alice knew was that she desperately wanted to kill something.

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