Katabasis — Chapter no 4

Chapter Four

Down-climbing was harder than going up.

For one thing you couldn’t see your next foothold and just had to assume that if you shimmied down, then your toes would find something to latch on to. And climbing down was no easier on tired arms, for one expended just as much energy making sure that the downward momentum didn’t take you too far.

But Peter fared better this time around. It helped, psychologically, that they were shrinking rather than growing the distance from the ground. It helped also that, halfway to the bottom, he shrugged off his rucksack and let it thump to the ground. “Just books,” he panted. “They’ll survive.”

He tumbled the last meter but landed all in one piece. Alice jumped down beside him and landed sprightly on her feet. This hurt her heels, but she had a silly urge to impress Peter. People in the climbing club were always impressing each other by landing like cats. Sadly, he did not notice.

Hell, on this side of the wall, appeared as a flat, empty field—no Shades, no paths, no shape on the horizon that indicated any place or thing.

Gone was that rolling plain. They were stuck again in endless desert, with no clear destination. Alice felt a dull panic at this sight, for they had nothing to show for a whole day’s effort, and she hated to ever pause her work without an idea of where to pick up next. But their limbs were jelly, and their brains complete fuzz, and they agreed between them to leave this puzzle for tomorrow.

They made camp in the shadow of the wall. The literature had been split on whether day and night existed in Hell—the more dramatic accounts claimed endless night—but it turned out that the too-dim sun did eventually set, and the air did chill, and about half past six Cambridge time (Alice’s watch still worked) everything turned pitch-black. It seemed Hell had no moon, or if it did, she was hiding. They sat alone in the solid dark, and their only comfort was the silence—for if anything lurked beyond, at least they didn’t know.

Alice made a small fire with matches and starter kindling. Peter parceled out two sticks of Lembas Bread each. Technically one should have been enough for every eight hours, but they both felt they deserved to chew on something for more than several seconds.

“Thank you.” Peter broke the silence. “For earlier. That was—that

helped a lot.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You know, I really thought I was going to die.” He shook his head.

“Dear God. I’ve never felt so sure I was going to die.”

“I wouldn’t have let you die,” Alice said blithely. The words just rolled off her tongue, since they seemed so obviously the right things to say.

Though the moment she heard them out loud, they felt off. Those were easy utterances between loved ones, even between friends—between any two people friendlier than whatever Alice and Peter were right now. There was an implicature of trust. But the problem was, bluntly, that she didn’t know if it was true. She suspected Peter didn’t know either. “Professor Grimes would be very disappointed, for one thing.”

“Well. Can’t disappoint Professor Grimes.”

For a moment they chewed and swallowed in silence. Lembas Bread had a terrible way of sticking in your mouth. It got up in your gums and under your tongue and made you feel for hours like you’d dragged your open mouth through a sand bank. The only way to get it all out was to swish with liquor, for Lembas Bread dissolved in alcohol, but they had none.

Alice wished she could dig a pinkie around her molars—but alas, not in front of Peter. To some fool part of her brain it still mattered that she didn’t look childish in front of Peter.

“It’s strange, you know.” Peter tilted his head back, eyes half-lidded.

“Hearing you talk about him.”

“Who, the professor?”

It was always Professor Grimes with them. The full word and surname.

Not “Grimes,” not even “Prof Grimes.” Most faculty encouraged their graduate students to address them by their first names—they were colleagues now, their relationship was different, more equal—but Professor Grimes would have recoiled in disgust if they were ever to try calling him Jacob.

“Yeah,” said Peter. “I thought you didn’t like him all that much.”

Alice prickled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I—well, nothing in particular. I just thought—I don’t know, you always seemed a bit on edge around him. Recently, I mean.”

“He’s the greatest magician alive. You’d be stupid not to be on edge.”

Peter considered this, then nodded. “I didn’t mean to imply that your— your relationship was bad. I just thought you weren’t too fond of each other.

I mean—just in the last term—I suppose it wasn’t hard to notice . . .” He

trailed off.

Alice blinked down at her hands.

Yes, things had been decidedly chilly between her and Professor Grimes in the weeks leading up to his death. Yes, he had yelled at her once or twice and she had yelled back and the rest of the department had probably noticed. Had probably talked about it when she wasn’t there. The thought of their whispers made her insides curdle with shame—and so too did Peter’s inquisitive, purportedly concerned face.

“Any private issues aside,” she said flatly, “Professor Grimes is my best shot at getting a job.”

“No, of course,” Peter said quickly. “I mean, same here.”

“Oh, please.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re Peter Murdoch! Aren’t they falling over themselves to hire you?”

Peter hesitated. His mouth opened slightly. Something, clearly, was on the tip of his tongue—but he wouldn’t say it, at least not to her.

Alice almost asked him what he’d meant earlier, when he said Professor Grimes was his last chance at this profession. She wished she knew what had happened. Every department in the field had a raging boner for Peter Murdoch. It was open knowledge that second-rate departments had been sniffing around trying to extend an early hire offer ever since he passed his qualifying exams. But she couldn’t think of a way to ask this that wasn’t nosy, or downright rude.

Perhaps once she might have. But that intimacy had long disappeared.

And if she pressed, she knew, he would only vanish.

“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose I would have found a new advisor after the Cooke.”

Alice’s heart stuttered. “You won the Cooke?”

“I only found out last week,” he said. “They were delayed in their admissions cycle this year on account of—well, you know. The accident.”

Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or- flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.

So it wasn’t her after all; so she’d been wrong to hope.

“Congratulations,” she said, ever so lightly, so her voice wouldn’t break.

“That’s marvelous.”

“Thank you,” said Peter. “I really wasn’t sure I’d get it, but I suppose they liked my proposal after all.”

“Of course they liked it,” she said flatly.

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to brag.”

“Of course not.”

“I just—it all happened very quickly, so I’m still wrapping my head around it.” Peter cleared his throat. “Sorry, that was tactless. I suppose—I guess, if you didn’t get it—I mean, I guess they just didn’t want a linguist this year. Er—I mean, not as a slight against linguists. But you know what I

mean.”

Oh, fuck you, thought Alice.

The previous year she had applied for, and expected to win, the prestigious Cooke Fellowship for dissertation research. The Cooke Fellowships, founded a century ago by a widow of one of the founding theoreticians of English magick, were incredibly prestigious. They offered not only ample funding for summer travel to anywhere in the world, but also a procession of dinners and cocktail parties before and after with the Cooke family descendants. The descendants were invariably insufferable, but the parties were well attended because no one liked to say no to free food, and so this let you rub elbows with the academic elite for weeks on end. Cooke Fellows could only be nominated by senior members of the Royal Academy of Magick, whose ranks included Professor Grimes.

“You’ll get the Cooke,” he had assured her, all those months ago. “Oh, they’ll love you. You’ll be the best candidate they’ve seen in years. They’ve been dying to nominate a woman—you’re a shoo-in.” And since back then Alice still believed every word out of his mouth, she spent days after that conversation delirious with glee.

But then some months passed, and Professor Grimes had started changing the subject every time she brought it up. She tried to do it with subtlety. She would mention another research opportunity and follow it up with, “Though I suppose it’ll conflict with the Cooke.” But all he ever gave her was evasive nods and murmurs. “We’ll see,” he said. “It’s always a coin toss.” And then, later on, “You know, the Cooke’s very competitive.” And later than that, “I heard they’re not overfond of linguists.”

Around the time the Cooke short list was supposed to be announced, she began checking her pidge three times a day. Funny how when something enormous was at stake you refused to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Every day she stared into that empty cubbyhole and tried to convince herself that all her perceptions were wrong; that if she only stared hard enough, a thick purple envelope would materialize amidst the dust. She jumped whenever the phone rang. She eavesdropped on faculty meetings.

She was triggered by the very mention of the word “Cooke,” which made conversations about food very difficult.

She felt so stupid now. Of course it hadn’t gone to her.

She wanted something to hurt him with then. Peter knew what he’d done, throwing that in her face. He ought to know how it felt.

“I thought about a new advisor too.” She tried to sound very casual. “I mean, Grimes did introduce me to some colleagues while we were in Italy. I thought about reaching out after the accident, but Europe really isn’t my first choice for a degree. They’re all so—postmodernist over there, don’t you think?”

It worked. Peter went rigid—only subtly, but she could sense the shift.

He took the bait. “When were you in Italy?”

“Last summer,” said Alice. “It was a very last-minute thing. I’m not sure what happened. But Professor Grimes called me to his office one morning and told me to have all my things packed by Friday.”

She knew full well what had happened. Everyone knew Peter was supposed to accompany Professor Grimes to Rome for the biannual Arcana conference. But Peter, Professor Grimes grumbled, had not been feeling well as of late. “Unreliable,” he’d muttered; which Alice delighted to hear, since she had been waiting for everyone else to catch on to this for years.

“Something’s going on with that kid. He’s out. It’s yours, Alice, if you want it.”

“I’ll pack tonight,” Alice had breathed. She’d felt so lucky then that she didn’t even bother to wonder why he hadn’t picked her for the trip in the first place, or what was going on with Peter, or indeed whether perhaps someone should check up on Peter. Professor Grimes had that effect. If he got you alone, if he said even a slightly flattering word, everything else melted away.

It was, indeed, a glorious summer in Italy. Alice and Professor Grimes made not one crucial breakthrough in the field, but three. She came home tanned, well-fed, and beaming with attention and praise. It was the peak of her career at Cambridge, and she wanted Peter to know precisely what he’d missed.

She couldn’t tell if it worked. Peter’s expression was decidedly— calculatedly?—neutral.

“It sounds like it was a very nice trip.”

“Thank you,” Alice said primly. “It really was.”

“I just thought . . .” Peter coughed. “Never mind. I’m glad you got to go.”

Silence hung between them. Alice should have been satisfied, but she felt sillier and sillier as the seconds trickled past. It was very clear now what they’d both done, and she felt supremely childish about it.

They both broke the silence at once.

“Honestly, let’s just—”

“Look, Law, maybe we should—”

They stared at each other.

“I don’t want to make things awkward,” said Peter.

“Oh, were things awkward?”

He brushed this off. “Suppose we bracket all problems for the living.

We can’t fight down here, Law, we’ve got to trust each other. We’re all we

have.”

She sniffed. “Fair enough.”

“Look, I am sorry I brought up the Cooke.”

“And I’m sorry I brought up Italy.” Alice felt so tired then. To be alone, with Peter Murdoch, in Hell—she didn’t know how much more of this she could take. She unzipped her rucksack and dug around the bottom until she found her camping blanket. “Suppose we just shut up and go to sleep.”

“What’s that?” Peter asked.

“A hypothermia blanket.” Alice unfolded the aluminum squares and arranged it over her legs. “It insulates body heat. I borrowed it from one of the residents.”

One advantage Alice had in Hell was that she knew how to pack for long journeys; knew exactly which shoes and rucksacks she needed to last for days on her feet. Cooking gear—no, she had Lembas Bread. Warm layers—yes. Chalk and knives—absolutely, yes. She’d been quite outdoorsy before she came to England. At Cornell, she’d spent most weekends doing gorge trails. She’d grown up in the Rockies. She had hiked Yosemite and the Appalachian Trail without help. This was what had convinced her she could make the trip. She’d done the White Mountains. How much worse could Hell be?

Though in truth, it all felt like reaching into a previous life. Alice had not been hiking in such a long time. Nor climbing, to be honest. She’d had so many hobbies before she started at Cambridge. She used to know what fresh air felt like. All this time in Grimes’s lab had turned her into a ghoul that lived on canned soups and crackers. And she’d been stunned, after digging through to the very bottom of her closet, that she still had the hiking bag at all.

“Very cool.” Peter settled back, resting his head on his rucksack. He folded his hands over his chest.

She stared at him. “You didn’t bring a blanket?”

“I guess I forgot.”

“Didn’t you consider sleeping?”

“Well, I’ve slept in the lab plenty before, remember? We didn’t need blankets then.”

“Murdoch, it’s freezing.” Alice sat up. A part of her already regretted this, but she felt she had to offer. He was too pathetic otherwise. “Do you

want to share?”

“Ah—well, it looks rather small.”

“It folds out further.” She lifted up an edge. “See?”

He blinked, considering. “I’ll just slide my legs under.”

“You sure?”

“That’ll keep me warm enough.”

“Whatever suits you.”

Peter scooted toward her. There was the requisite awkward fumbling of limbs, of shuffling into a determination of boundaries both physical and

emotional, but at last they settled into an arrangement that minimally covered Peter’s lower half but did not bring their bodies unbearably close.

“Well, good night,” said Peter.

“Good night,” Alice mumbled.

Alice had always struggled to sleep when camping. She didn’t like being out in the open at night, without at least five solid walls separating her and the things that wanted to eat her. And she should have been even more anxious out here; under Hell’s moonless, starless sky; with who- knows-what lurking in the dunes. But exhaustion trumped all—and to be honest, so too did the even, steady rhythm of Peter’s breath, familiar as a lullaby. Very soon she was fast asleep, and miraculously, for the first time in many months, she did not dream.

EVERYONE TOLD MAGICIANS IN TRAINING TO at least consider careers in other fields before they went on the job market. “Alt academia,” they called it, like it was some punk and rebellious lifestyle, like failing at the single thing you’d been trained to do made you cool. But halfway into her degree, Alice felt that anything but magick was simply not an option. She became a tenured magician, or she died. She could envision no life worth living otherwise.

Besides, no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.

These aphorisms were uttered by tenured professors who had already caught the golden goose, who could comfortably know they would never face the terrors their students now did. “Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs. And they said it with a kind, patronizing lilt that betrayed what they truly meant: alt academia meant failure. The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.

Of course one could demand why anyone would put themselves through such nonsense in the first place. But here most academics’ thought

processes mirrored the logic of Pascal’s Wager, whether they realized it or not. Pascal’s Wager said that you could choose to believe in God or not, but if you bet wrong on God and didn’t live as though he existed, you were missing out on the infinite wonder of Heaven. Similarly, you could choose to believe the job market would work out for you or not, but if you bet wrong and opted out of the cycle, you were missing out on the infinite miracles of the Life of the Mind. Now, like in the case of Heaven, no one in Alice’s generation had yet experienced this Miraculous Life of the Mind, but all their professors assured them it was possible and so they plodded along.

Alice had also known, before she matriculated to do a PhD in analytic magick at Cambridge, that Professor Jacob Grimes was perhaps not everyone’s first choice for an advisor. Her undergraduate advisor at Cornell, a kindly junior scholar named Dr. Mills, had been doubtful when she first presented him her list.

“You seem very set on going abroad,” he had said.

“Well, here they’ve fired all the Communists.”

“Fair enough,” said Dr. Mills. “Still, I’d go to England over France.

Everything seems a good fit except for Grimes.”

“He’s the best in the world at linguistic magick,” said Alice.

“Oh, his work is excellent,” said Dr. Mills. “No one’s questioning that.

Only it’s rumored his graduate students aren’t very, ah, happy.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well—he’s quite hard on them, for the first thing. They tend to burn out quite fast. He doesn’t have a very good completion rate.”

“How bad is it?”

“I’d say about half don’t finish.”

Alice, who up until then had been blessed with kind and helpful professors, didn’t know how bad an advisor really could be. She thought, then, that if you didn’t get along with a professor, that was your fault. She thought, simply, that she would make sure she was in the half that did finish.

“But I want to work with the best in the field,” she said. “I want to get a job.”

This, Dr. Mills could understand. Good jobs in magick were increasingly hard to find. Every starry-eyed undergraduate wanted to become a magician, but the market was simply not good. On both sides of

the Atlantic the conservatives were several years in power, and this meant funding cuts for universities, shrinking departments, vanishing opportunities. Most schools had stopped offering magicians tenure when it became apparent that their researchers were more interested in the trivial and esoteric than producing anything useful or profitable or at least somewhat resembling the next nuclear weapon. It was the age of technological revolutions, of quantum physics and cable television with more than three channels and personal computers. Magick had been left behind. Magick was good only for dinner parties. Magick did not get you hired.

And there was no magick without the academy. Universities supplied the chalk, the syllabaries, the pentagram repositories. Universities published the journals, which determined which spells were valid and which ones weren’t. Of course there was such a thing as hedge witches—typically PhD students who’d failed out, terminal masters, or college graduates who had never gotten into a graduate program at all. And they weren’t entirely bereft of resources—many hedge witches scrounged up their own chalk, and organized amateur conferences, and published in poorly rated journals about their wonderful discoveries. In fact, some of these discoveries were quite interesting. The open secret, really, was that sometimes the hedge witches found stuff that even tenured professors couldn’t imagine. But none of it was going to be published in Arcana, and so none of it had credibility.

“I’ll write you the best recommendation I can,” Dr. Mills had said. “You have a good shot everywhere you apply—I’d feel good in your shoes. But do be careful, Alice. At this stage it seems like all that could possibly matter is getting in. Remember there is more at stake than your advisor’s approval, however. And there’s more to life than magick.”

Rich advice, Alice thought, from a man who was well on his way to tenure. She filed these words under “platitudes from adults who think they know better than you,” and then she promptly forgot them.

At Cambridge, the warnings redoubled. Graduate students, even those who weren’t studying magick, cast her sympathetic looks when she explained she was here to work with Grimes. Other faculty members went out of their way to ask if she was coping all right. And then there was Professor Grimes’s only other woman advisee, Olivia Kincaid, a puffy girl who seemed always to be crying during the first year Alice was at Cambridge and then was curiously absent during her second. By Alice’s

third, when Olivia should have graduated, she was bizarrely still in coursework.

“He is a monster,” Olivia told her in no uncertain terms over many pints of ale the first night they met. “He is simply a sociopath.”

“How so?” asked Alice.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Olivia said, vaguely and dramatically, which impelled Alice to write her off as a drama queen.

Olivia took medical leave her fourth year, returned for three weeks of coursework, and then promptly disappeared. No one in the department had ever heard from her again.

Other students recoiled when Alice revealed who her advisor was, and she observed their fear with an immodest thrill. Though she would never admit it, the idea of working with someone dangerous excited her. Alice had dazzled her way through years of higher education by being a teacher’s pet; by miraculously succeeding where others had failed. She relished the thought that her advisor might be harsh, impatient, even cruel to others—for that made his attentions to her worth all the more. She liked being the exception to the rule. Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

Anyhow, Professor Grimes’s cruelty was not random. You only had to try hard enough, to grind through sleepless nights, to meet his every impossible standard so that he considered you worthy of respect. This was fair. Wasn’t that just how academia worked? How any competitive industry worked? The best students got the best jobs.

Alice, for much of her graduate career, considered Professor Grimes a necessary trial. What didn’t kill you made you stronger—or at least gave you a thicker skin. For most of her life she had been first in her class, and she saw no reason why the PhD should be different. She only had three more years to go—and then two, then one—she only had to rub the sleep from her eyes and take a deep breath and survive every day and ignore every inconvenient truth until she had her diploma, until she was free.

And she’d nearly made it, too. That’s what made this whole mess that much more frustrating. The staircase had nearly held. She’d almost survived what no one believed she could, had almost tasted the rewards. If only she’d lasted just a little bit longer. She’d been so, so close.

OceanofPDF.com

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE HarperCollins Publishers …………………………………………………………