Page 104 of Katabasis
How much a simple word of encouragement could mean to a young and insecure mind. Professors never knew the impact of their utterances. They seemed not to realize that a careless comment, the briefest smile, could make or break a student’s day. Professors, who saw dozens of hopeful faces over the course of a day, forgot always that they were their students’ entire universe.
Though perhaps Professor Grimes did know. Perhaps this was why he met Alice’s eyes with such deliberation. Perhaps he knew what it meant to her—fresh from America with all the wrong clothes and mannerisms, terrified she’d tripped her way into a program where she was badly outclassed, and resentful already of the peers who seemed destined for Oxbridge from birth—to hear these words from his mouth.
All it took was those simple words, and Professor Grimes had Alice’s undying loyalty.
“Never let them make you feel like you don’t belong.” He leaned forward, and his gaze was so intense that Alice felt dizzy. “Posers in flapping gowns. Junior clerks in the making. Remember that you’re special, Alice Law. Remember your particular mental signature. That’s the only thing worth holding on to. That spark.” He rapped his knuckles against the table. “Welcome to Cambridge, Alice. We’re going to take apart the world.”
In the months to come Alice would learn that Professor Grimes, like her, had come up from less-than-illustrious circumstances. The son of an absent alcoholic who had in his youth squandered his own father’s fortune, Jacob Octavian Grimes spent late nights at the local library reading everything from Bacon to Wittgenstein. He had inherited that aristocratic curiosity that often skips generations. His was a mind meant for Mozart and Proust, and he clung to this conviction. There was no money for schooling past high school, so he joined the army, did his time overseas, and came back with a scholarship to a college in Austin, where he earned a technical degree in agricultural engineering. And then, through the persistent phone calls of one nearly retired professor who recognized in him a singular mathematical mind, Grimes found himself at Oxford, where he was so badly outclassed that for the first time in his life he longed for home. They mocked his handwriting, his outdated proofs. They imitated his drawl. They called him the Texan. They asked if he wore cowboy hats. He found himself looking up the cost of return fare. Then he thought more carefully of Lubbock, of stained floors and empty bottles. He remained.
Then there was the war. Jacob Grimes went back into uniform, this time with the War Office’s research division, and by the time things wrapped up he had a British passport and several medals as reward for his achievements. Perpetual Flasks, instant disinfectants, Lembas Bread that never ran out. Jacob Grimes had kept the troops alive. There were the failed interrogation trials—all increasingly sadistic versions of the Liar Paradox—but no one spoke anymore about those. For a brief moment after the war, magicians were celebrities, and Grimes’s face was printed on every newspaper in the country. The War Office’s Warlock, they called him.
He left the army with the sort of reputation that gives one unlimited research funding. He was just too late to join the glory of the Vienna Circle, but he rode the cutting edge of all the scientific world’s exploding innovations thereafter. During the war years everyone was obsessed with the bomb, but afterward there were solid-state physics, the transistor, the computer. New work in quantum physics was putting Einstein in his grave. Fred Hoyle coined the “big bang” moniker, and to his dismay, it took off. Nash proposed his game theory equilibrium in the fifties, and this set off a flurry of research into social paradoxes. The world was getting faster, more bewildering. Questions exploded, and Jacob Grimes chased them down each rabbit hole.
When the sixties rolled around, no one remembered Jacob Grimes as anything other than a fixture of the field. He was synonymous with analytic magick itself. He set the agenda. He had no beginning and no end; he had simply always beenthere, an incontrovertible fact of the discipline, a necessary encounter if you wanted to accomplish anything at all.
He had ascended to the hidden world. He brought his advisees with him.
This was the advantage of being a Grimes student. All the doors were open. You could get an audience with anyone; you could secure funding for anything; you could travel anywhere, and all it took was his assent. When Alice was under his wing, no one questioned her right to be in the room. “My student,” he would say, hand stretched toward her. And suddenly it was like she had a glow upon her. For the first time, people saw her. She spoke, and people listened.
So despite everything that happened after, Alice would always remember that it was Professor Grimes who believed in her first. He’d plucked her out of obscurity. He’d seen her file in a stack of applications, held it up to the light, and decided, yes. Yes she was worth his investment, worth initiating into a world of mystery, worth making her equal to what he was, an intrepid traveler through abstract lands. His was the first plank in her staircase of belief. And in a world founded on insincerity and insecurity, that faith was a debt she would always feel she had to repay.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alice flew into a frenzy outside the trap. She tried everything. She scrabbled around the sand, flinging it up in great fistfuls, just in case anything she touched disturbed the hidden pentagram. She drew every spell she could think of. She dug a knife into her fingertips and soaked the ground with great dribbles of blood, white dust glowing red. It didn’t matter. Her chalk faded into the sand. She screamed to Peter, begging him to try the spell again, to come out and join her. The trap held firm. If he heard her shrieks, she couldn’t know.
She fled when she heard skittering on the horizon. She had half a mind to stay rooted where she was, to plop herself on the ground and let the Kripkes take her too. That would be the easiest thing to do. But Peter’s wide, plaintive eyes were burned into her mind. To die then, after his sacrifice, would be spitting on his corpse. So she snatched up the rucksack and ran as fast as she could, choking back her cries.
She needn’t have bothered. The Kripkes paid her no heed. Several moments later the skittering ceased, and a victorious howl echoed over the sands. Alice paused, horribly compelled to turn around. She saw them stalking in a straight line across the sand. She could not see their faces clearly from where she stood: only their frames, two large figures and a smaller one. Like Elspeth they dressed head to toe in armor, but where hers was of chain-link debris, theirs was of white bone. Sharp fangs arced past their jaws. Something else’s ribs caged their torsos. Bulbous round things hung at all their waists, bobbing at they moved. Pouches for blood, Elspeth had told her. They made them with bladders.
The little procession paused before the boulders. The two older Kripkes bent over, incantating over their spell. A ripple formed in the sand. One by one they disappeared inside. Alice heard a sharp, grating noise. Metal screeching. She heard Peter scream.
She screamed too through her balled-up fingers, fists shoved in her mouth to muffle her sounds. She sank to her knees, shoulders convulsing. The pressure was terrible. She thought she would split apart. But the only thing more terrible than the feeling itself was that obliteration didn’t come, that she kept on hurting. She had never felt anything so sharp. Before she had only thought this grief theoretical, a grief that exceeded what words could describe. The only thing that came close was the Classical Chinese phrase “??,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” ? meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.
She wished it were her they were bleeding and gutting in there. She’d have given anything to change places. She wished to feel those blades digging into her skin, pulling her veins apart, because compared to this pain, that evisceration would be so clean and sweet. But no matter how hard she wished it she could not will it into being, and when the scarlet fog lifted she was still alive, and Peter was still dying.
She screamed her muffled screams until Peter’s cries faded to nothing, until his blood was drained into those fat pouches. Then she got up, wiped her face, and kept on running.
For the rest of the nightAlice roamed the dunes. Landmarks drifted in and out of the edges of her vision. Gleaming bones. Jagged rocks. All of Violence looked the same, a barren field stretching endless from the river. She would have preferred to faint, for that would have relieved her of the burden of consciousness, but she was filled with adrenaline. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she could nearly feel her pulse in her dry mouth and ringing ears—she had to keep moving, she decided; she would simply keep moving until that terrible energy exhausted itself and she broke down.
Still the moment wouldn’t come, so Alice kept moving.
Her head would not quiet. She tried her staircase; she strained to focus; none of it worked; the television blared. She could only replay in excruciating detail every second of those final moments inside the pit. Peter’s scribbling. The arc of chalk on sand. His soft, sweet smile. She couldn’t determine whether she’d done enough—if she’d protested harder, if she’d convinced him otherwise, if she’d wrestled that chalk out of his hand... But these were questions that had no answers. All she could remember was her cries, and Peter’s resolve.
Peter—Peter—Peter. Her memory track slid sideways, conjuring back every detail. The flop of his hair, the warmth of his curved frame against her back. The sweet, slightly musty scent that floated around him when it was late, when he hadn’t showered. The sound of his voice, his laugh. Peter had such a wonderful laugh. It gripped all of him, made his arms and shoulders shake; it had a vulnerable, helpless quality to it, as if it seized him completely and he had no choice but to submit to his mirth.
Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next. But Peter wasn’t here anymore; the Kripkes had drained his blood and obliterated his soul; he wasn’t in any world anymore, this one or the next, and it was all her fault.
Her guilt accumulated with every step. She kept retracing the worst decisions she’d made. The resentment simmering under her skin every time she saw him on campus. The disdain she felt for his smile. All those quips and jabs. The worst things she’d believed about him; her vile resentment. Ugly, wretched, petty—it was like watching a horror film from within her own body; she recognized herself as the actor but could not grasp the logic of every awful decision. She didn’t recognize this person, this nasty resentful scheming little bitch. But memories didn’t lie. She had done and said it all, and she had to live with the guilt.
All Peter had ever done was save her life. Meanwhile all Alice had ever done was hurt the people trying to help her, and it was so obvious she didn’t deserve to live, and she wished she could just get it over with and die, except that, for Peter’s sake, this was the one thing she could not do.
The sun rose. The dim orangelight illuminated rolling desert all around her. The silhouettes of the early courts had long disappeared. Alice had not realized until now how much she would miss them. Dreadful and claustrophobic as they were, they were at leastfamiliar, were tangible structures she could touch and recognize and ground herself in. What she would give now for a nap in Desire, or even a study break in Pride! They oriented her, even if all their directions were false. But here the world grew further and further from the world that mortal souls knew, and this unanchoring terrified her.
She was deep in Cruelty. At some point in the night, she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree. Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty fucked with you on purpose. She kept coming across mysterious structures—interlacing bone, precipitously balanced, arranged occasionally like abstract art. Shapes carved out on the sand. Footsteps, maybe human, dancing in patterns she couldn’t make sense of. Sometimes she found what looked like paths, lines traced carefully in imitation of road marks, only they ended abruptly or turned back in on themselves. Near the shore she glimpsed once a semicircle of slabs that called to mind lawn chairs on the green. Deep in her journey she found a pure, smooth marble block, about the size of a door, unmarked and unguarded. She spent the better part of an hour running her hands around the block, trying to detect any clues about its presence, trying to lure its creator out from hiding. But this block yielded nothing; no secret carvings, no hidden design. She screamed in frustration, and kicked at the block until her toes hurt.
She tried to conjure an explanation for it all. Suppose the Shades sought shelter. Suppose these arrangements were temporary houses, stations in which to rest and reflect. Suppose the Shades threw beach parties here. Suppose the Shades put on art exhibits. But really it seemed like bones thrown together in some attempt at amusement—at making meaning upon a plane that was, fundamentally, meaningless. Alice saw clearly now she was trespassing across the desert of consciousness, a map of madness; and the landmarks she witnessed were just the same delusions of everyone who had come before.
Now and then she saw glittering oases out of the corner of her eye. She did not stop to drink. She still had her copied Perpetual Flask, and she knew better than to drink Hell’s water. But once she detoured, curious, toward a pool. She thought she might run her fingers through that gleaming surface. She wondered if there would be drowned things below, hints of what came before. But when she knelt and reached, her hands found a solid surface. No water here; just a sheet of obsidian glass. Someone had polished and sculpted it with just enough curve so that even up close, it looked liquid.
