Page 108 of Katabasis
“Who are you?”
“I’m Alice,” she whispered. “Alice Law.”
“You’re one of the living.” His voice was like gravel, like earth shifting.
She didn’t see the point in pretending. “Yes.”
His eyes flickered up and down the chalk stains on her sweater. “You’re a magician.”
“Yes.”
He burst into laughter.
“Heavens,” he said. “I have been waiting, and waiting, and now here you are.”
This Alice found vaguely threatening. She pulled herself to her feet, and immediately regretted it; a wave of vertigo hit and she swayed, her vision pulsing black.
The Shade put his hands up. “I won’t hurt you.”
“What do you want?”
“Only to speak.” The Shade veered forward, until once again he was inches away. He seemed to have no conception of personal boundaries. No matter how she shifted his face loomed close to hers, as if he were about to lick or kiss her. “But you, of the living—what are you doing here, all alone in Hell?”
What indeed was she doing? Still she had no answer, and she did not think this Shade needed to hear of her regrets. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Where might that someone be?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I’ve searched Upper Hell. I have wandered Wrath, Cruelty, Violence, and Tyranny. I never found him, and I have reason to suspect his sins were not so light.”
“You think he is in Dis.”
“I—yes, that’s right.” Alice had been certain the city was real; all the reliable archives agreed so; but it startled her to hear its name confirmed from the mouth of the dead. So it was there, so it was waiting. “He must be.”
“And you need to find the gates.”
I have a guide, Alice wished to say, but she saw now Archimedes had absconded; she was again on her own. “I suppose.”
“Come on, then.” The Shade nodded toward the horizon. “I’ll show you. Safe passage.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean,what for?”
“I don’t mean to offend.” Alice thought of George Edward Moore, mad for a chum. She thought of the Weaver Girl’s girlish laughter. She thought of Elspeth, righteous and vengeful. “Only we—I haven’t had a wonderful time here. And we are in Lower Hell. Everyone wants something.”
Again the Shade rumbled with laughter. He turned his eyes back on her, and this time they became the most solid things about him; deep stone, hollows of time. “A story for a song,” he said. “That’s all. You want to know of Dis. I want to know of life.”
So here she was in thedeepest circles of Hell on a brisk stroll with a Shade whose sins she did not know.
Alice couldn’t determine if she was very lucky or very foolish. At least this Shade—he introduced himself as John Gradus, which seemed an obvious lie—did not pretend to be her friend. His desires were quite clear. He badgered her for information on the world as she knew it. He was not at all interested in political or historical developments. She tried to tell him about the Soviet Union, and he waved a hand in impatience. Instead he wanted accounts of what brands of chalk were now in vogue (“Shropley’s? They haven’t gone bankrupt?”), what kinds of foods were then served at dining halls (“Still the same mashed potatoes? Does the Yorkshire pudding still taste like cardboard?”), and how girls’ fashion evolved on campus (Alice felt a bit icky describing this one, but Gradus seemed satisfied with a mumbled answer about skirts and stockings. How short? She didn’t recall. Above the knees? Well, sometimes. Not in college, but sometimes.) She didn’t mind the interrogations. Here her memory came in handy, and she needed only close her eyes, summon photographs to her mind, and recount the details as they walked.
“The London skyline?”
“There’s been a lot of new construction. They’ve got this big ugly thing, the NatWest tower, sticks straight into the air like a blunt.”
“The music?”
She recalled the window of a record store and told him all the names she had seen there. “Judas Priest. Soup Dragons. Iron Maiden. Talking Heads.”
