Page 119 of Katabasis
“Me!”
Alice heard a high-pitched ringing in her head.
“My arm, Cerberus—rip it off!”
“My head—”
“My juicy guts!”
Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all.Oh, God, she thought frantically,why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars...
Only the Shade named Gertrude had not left the room. She stood still by the window, watching the proceeds with perfect calm. Alice felt a sort of horrified fascination with her, perhaps akin to the fascination schoolboys felt for their severe and pretty teachers.
“Pathetic, isn’t it?” asked Gertrude. “The things they do for entertainment.”
“You don’t write,” said Alice.
“Oh, no. I refuse.”
Alice nodded to the shrieking bodies. “Then what makes you any different from them?”
“I don’t see reincarnation as the answer,” said Gertrude. “I see reincarnation as the escape. Escape for weaker wills who cannot face their new world with resolve, who cannot understand thatthis is it, this is all we have.” Gertrude turned away from the window. Her harsh eyes met Alice’s own, and a shiver ran up Alice’s spine. “May I show you?”
“Leave her be,” said Gradus. “No one’s interested in your cult.”
“We must all decide for ourselves, Gradus.”
“What cult?” Alice asked.
“A fellowship,” Gertrude clarified. “Come freely, leave freely.”
“That isn’t true.”
“You left, did you not?”
“Alice,” Gradus said urgently. “Trust me.”
Alice tilted her head. “But why would I do that?”
Gertrude was a question mark. Meanwhile Gradus had brought her into Dis to mock and disturb her. She had no reason to trust either of them, but between them, Gertrude had not yet laughed at her despair.
Alice could have blamed her choice on reason then. Professor Grimes might be with Gertrude, indeed was probably with Gertrude. Certainly she would not lump him in with those screaming Shades. But it was impulse above all else; impulse and curiosity, to see the final refuge of sinners.
“Why, Gradus.” Gertrude cocked her head, and her voice was a velvet threat. “Who is she to you?”
For a moment Alice feared Gradus might reveal she was not dead. But his face blanked. His grayness wrapped around him like a shawl, and he made no response.
Gertrude extended her hand to Alice. Alice reached for it, then hesitated. “Where are you taking me?”
Gertrude nodded to the wall. There was a wooden door Alice had not seen before. Gertrude pulled it open, revealing a tiny, spiraling set of stairs. Alice could not tell where they led, or how high they reached; only that the narrow stone steps curled into darkness.
“Into the Rebel Citadel,” said Gertrude. “Into the way out.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gertrude glided, and Alice followed. During the Italy tour Alice had climbed the steps of the Duomo in Florence, a dreadful idea in the dead of summer, four hundred and sixty-three steps in suffocating heat that she counted one by one in her head, because nothing else in that dim, unventilated, claustrophobic spiral gave her any reason to continue. One woman suffered something resembling a heart attack halfway up, and the rest of them had to press themselves tight against the wall as she and her husband shuffled, gasping, back down. Once every hundred stairs there was a tiny window in the stone, and everyone pressed their face against the bars as they walked past, desperate for a breeze.
Alice could only assume the architect of Dis had been inspired by the Duomo. But the interstitial windows here afforded no cool air, only small rectangles of Hell’s burnt-orange sky. Her legs burned; her lungs could not get enough air. She turned all her efforts on putting one foot in front of another, on ignoring how many there had been and how many there were to go. At last, just as she feared she might faint, they emerged into a courtyard.
