Page 124 of Katabasis
“Now look what you’ve done,” said the knob. “You’ve woken him up.”
Alice didn’t understand why the knob was so peeved. It could only be a good thing that this Shade would shrug off the forest. It was a miracle, in fact, that after a hundred years, anything here could summon the subjectivity to return from plant to person.
“Hello,” she said.
The undergrowth exhaled in response.
The whole bush quivered, seemed to scrunch itself up, and then with a ripping noise the Shade tore himself free of his surrounding bush. He stood. He was quite tall; a great, hulking mass, all his extremities still ending in branches. His face was a gray blur but took on finer distinction with every passing second. An uneven slope of a mouth emerged from the haze. A nose. Two bright, blinking eyes.
“Settle down,” the knob told him. “Settle, won’t you—”
The Shade took a wobbly step. The whole of him lurched, but he kept on his feet.
“Settle down,” repeated the knob, more urgently this time. “Now, let’s think about what we’re doing—”
The Shade strode with purpose down the path.
“Hold on.” Alice hurried after him. “Where are you—”
The Shade began to run. Alice followed after him, curious. The Shade went down a path and turned a corner. Suddenly the forest ended, and the shore lay open beneath them.
“No—” cried Alice, but it was too late. The Shade sprinted off the cliff and, for a single, weightless moment, was suspended in the air. Then the Lethe imposed its gravity. Some eddy opened, beckoning, and the Shade swirled down.
She had to look.
The Shade landed facedown and did not resist. For several seconds he floated atop the waters, and then parts of him began melting into the current—bright, swirling colors that unfurled in long, thick streaks. Alice had visions of a jellyfish, a parachute, a magician’s scarf; so many colors emerging from a single point, an endless fount of memories stretching to ten feet, twenty; a cartoon strip of a life laid out for anyone to see, and she was beginning to wonder just how much territory it could cover until at last it all mixed and blurred, then dissolved into the beating black. Then the obsidian face of the Lethe was just as before. Swallowing all, releasing nothing.
Vertigo hit. Alice swayed.
Two contradictory impulses swirled inside her then.
First, a vicious pang of jealousy at thecompleteness—at that mad swirl of colors that was finally, mercifully, allowed to dim.
Second, only now did she learn how badly she did not want to die.
She teetered over the edge, and a howling rush came up at her; a violent invisible force that left her skull spinning, her knees weak.Not me, she thought;not me, not now, not yet, not like this. Blood thundered in her ears, and did not let up until she staggered back to safety.
She swayed and turned away. She found all the trees of the citadel were bent toward her. All the malice of countless souls focused on a single point. In a single voice they said,Thorn.
Alice ran.
She did not want to go toward the forest but she had to get away from the cliffs, and this left only the paved path through the campo’s center. The grove howled and gathered around her—leaves reaching, branches curling. The whole orchard moaned and contracted. So many faces emerged from the leaves; mouths yawning, eyes blinking open, necks creaking in her direction. What saved Alice was its inertia. There was no real animosity in that forest. The forest had trained so long to feel nothing that it had forgotten how to hate. The forest did not care much about Alice at all except that, like a lazy waking organism, it had identified the source of its discomfort and tried with every degree of movement it had to scratch her away. Tendrils stretched, but Alice batted them back. She broke free of the courtyard and raced down the marble path. She was faintly aware of Gertrude shrieking above her but did not stop to look. She dashed across the terrace, past the statues and fountains, and back into the narrow staircase. The light dimmed; she had no sense of where she was, only that her feet were still pounding the steps, and that she was headed down, down, down.
She broke out onto the ground floor. The entry was transformed. No wooden door. Only a block of solid stone now—an impossible cell, with no doors, no windows, no way out. Gertrude had lied, and Alice was trapped in Dis.
But this was an old trick! Alice reached the wall, saw its smooth construction, and nearly screeched with laughter. If magicians had built this place, then magicians were still telling the same joke. She knew exactly how it went, could recite it in the exact cadence of a first-year telling it for the first time at the pub. Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language. What are doors and windows?
“Doors and windows keep you in,” Alice breathed, and raced forward without stopping. She did not even need to draw a pentagram for this, the illusion was so flimsy. She had been through it many times before; she had seen this trick at the entrance to her own department. “Doors and windows can be shut. There are no doors and windows, and so the way is not shut, and so there’s nothing in my way.”
It worked.
Lord have mercy, it worked. The walls pressed in dark for just a moment, a single terrifying moment where Alice felt squeezed between the marble before her and the reaching grove behind. Then she broke through into the overbright courtyard, and even that hot, stale air was a wonderful relief.
She did not stop there. She ran past the bazaar, past the hawkers and skeptics and believers. Past Laplace’s Demon and the shredded manuscripts. Past howling Cerberus and the bodies in his wake; past those great gates, for there was no guard on the inside, and the doors swung easily open when she pushed. She passed the laughing Parmenides, who screeched behind her, asking if she’d gotten what she came for; she ran away from Dis until the city was a dwindling point on the horizon, away from the Lethe until the shore was long faded from sight. She ran until she was alone again on the dunes, under the low-burning sun amidst bleached-white bones, far from the comfort of human structure, from anything that remotely resembled the world above; back into the waste land where the only force that gave sense to anything was her own deteriorating thoughts.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Now Alice was properly lost.
