Page 106 of Katabasis
She saw its shadow first, for she had been trekking with her head stooped, registering nothing but the ground before her. At first she found it odd, this streak of darker ground among the gray, but then she lifted her eyes and saw a great spire not a hundred yards off; a single, sharp point on the horizon.Ah, she thought,it’s a clock tower, it’s the center of campus; for at Cornell you never needed a watch nor a map, you only gazed up to the bell tower, and you knew your way home. But of course it was not a clock tower, for in Hell there was no time to keep, no reason for bells to ring, and near the top where a clock face should have been was only a blank circle.That is cruel, she thought.You did that on purpose, that is so very cruel.
As she drew closer she realized the tower base was not built with rock as she’d thought, but sprawled and twisting forms—human faces and torsos, piled upon one another, frozen in their fight to climb away. Whether they were Shades or likenesses carved in stone, she could not tell. Arcing round the tower base was a line of rocks balanced over raised bits of dirt. A low wall, and easily trespassed, but a boundary nonetheless.
She heard a hissing. She looked up.
Upon the balcony stood three deities. Tall sinuous bodies, skin like marble, garbed in flowing cloth of the deepest red. Great hulking wings protruded from their shoulders. Alice understood these must be the Erinyes. Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, chthonic creatures born of that blood shed from that first broken oath, when Kronos slew his father and cast his parts into the ocean. One for anger, one for rage, and one for endless destruction. Dark, curling hair undulated round their faces. They were very beautiful.
All three looked down on her at once.
Their eyes were without pupils; a singular scorching gaze. Alice felt a terrible heat as they scrutinized her, more intense even than Professor Grimes’s gaze had ever been. She felt stripped of her clothes; of her flesh and bone. She was only soul, shuddering and naked, unable to conceal every evil or selfish thought she’d ever held. It seemed to linger for an eternity. Every thought extricated, suspended, turned over, and carefully considered. She was reduced to her unexamined truths. And a deep triplet voice echoing round her skull, demanding again and again:Whose oaths have you broken?
Alice squeezed her own eyes shut but it did not matter; still the Erinyes’ gaze scorched her mind. She felt so small, tiny and mortal and pathetic. She felt like she had never had an original thought in her life. A confessor laying everything bare, only there was nothing interesting to say, only the normal human filth.I was proud, I desired, I was greedy, I was wrathful—
WHOSE OATHS HAVE YOU BROKEN?
“All of them,” she gasped. “I don’t know—”
LIAR, they three spoke at once.
The heat intensified. Hell faded out into a white plane, upon which Alice could only see moving shadows. A body spinning upside down. A noose. A heap. Flames licked around her face. Her ears thundered, the heat sharpened, and Alice heard the Furies cackling, and the burning question repeated until it scorched into her mind:
Why—
Why—
Tell us—
Why?
But this was just the thing she could not answer herself. She knew she had erred, but her sins felt like they had been committed by someone else, for reasons she could not fathom, and the only defense she could offer was that along every step of the way, from start to finish, each next move had in that very moment seemed the only rational thing. Grimes died, so Alice went to Hell; Peter hurt her, so she hurt him back. Elspeth had what they needed, and so they tried to steal. One thing led to another and that was all. She didn’t mean to obfuscate. She wanted to be good for these beautiful burning women. She wanted to confess all, except every way she cast it made it seem that much flimsier, trite and convenient, as if her whole life story were beads knocking about an abacus. “I was just trying,” she whispered. “I only—I was only doing my best.”
Abruptly the flames died. The heat vanished. Alice lurched forward and gasped, small and limp, a candle doused in water. High above atop their perch, the Erinyes threw their heads back and laughed.
“Professor Grimes,” said Alice. “Is he here?”
The Erinyes ignored her. They shook in their mirth; their great wings pulsing, magnificent heads thrown back, displaying proud, white necks.Come in if you wish, said their laughter.We care not.
So Alice stepped over the wall, and entered the final court of Hell.
The Eighth Court was very quiet.Whatever Shades lurked on the border seemed wary of the tower, and as she continued forth, their malicious presence faded. She was all alone now. Gradually the tower receded into a tiny prick on the horizon, and vanished, leaving Alice in a truly empty terrain: the river constant on her left, a sheet of orange above, a sheet of gray stretching endless to the right. She was dazed enough to find this pretty, this geometrical neatness. Here were three concepts displayed with perfection. Finite boundary, finite point, infinite plane.I live now in a textbook, she thought;I am a diagram of the Poincaré disk.
She saw then specks whirling gently in the air before her. Further ahead, more white specks littered the ground.
Birds? How lovely that would be. Alice had seen a beach once just before dawn, while all the seagulls were still asleep. She had always imagined that seagulls slept in nests; she did not know they also slept on the beach, heads tucked into their downy backs, little white lumps dotting the sandbar. She drew closer, and was disappointed to find those white things were not birds but scraps of paper. She reached out and picked one up. Strange, after all these immaterial shades, to touch something so incredibly human and material. It was modern paper, too. Smooth, bright stuff, with none of the ink bleeding or rough textures that dated older papers. These were not the detritus of Elspeth’s collection, old unwanted things scrounged from the living. This was fresh stationery, sourced from Hell.
The page Alice held was blank. Others, however, seemed covered in lines. She chased another paper in the wind, snatched it, and held it up to her face. The handwriting was so looping and messy she could hardly make out what it said. Really the only legible fragment was what appeared to be a table of contents.
Part One—My Upbringing
Part Two—My Pathology
Part Three—My Unfortunate and Inevitable Criminality
Why, thought Alice, these were rough drafts of a dissertation. They obeyed the structure of a dissertation precisely—the flow of chapters, the slow development of arguments over three clearly delineated sections. There were footnotes, appendices, and even a dramatic conclusion, with stakes and implications for the field: “Why I Therefore Deserve Redemption, and a Ride Across the Lethe.”
She skimmed one page of the section titled “Part One—My Upbringing.” Her eyes fell on several footnotes professing that the author’s family was of little means, and so he had no choice but to run in the streets and fall in with the bad sort rather than growing up pursuing virtuous hobbies like playing the violin. His father had beat him, and this instilled in him a hatred of the world. His mother turned a blind eye, and his sisters mocked him, and his German nanny often sent him to bed without his supper, and this instilled in him a fierce hatred of the other sex.
Alice flipped to the section labeled “Part Three—My Unfortunate Criminality.”
