Page 126 of Katabasis
They moved again, in tandem. Then again, and again. Step by step they moved along the sands, locked in their dance of apprehension. The cat did not pounce; Alice did not draw her knife. Still it seemed critical that she did not drop her gaze, for whenever her eyes slid the cat hunched forward, sniffing for any lapse in vigilance. So Alice kept her gaze as focused as she could while she moved, locked on the cat’s famished, bloodshot eyes. And because of this, she wasn’t looking when she stepped into the Kripkes’ trap.
Suddenly her foot wouldn’t move.
She knew the moment she stepped that she was trapped; recognized the congealing that spread through her limbs and up her body. It was a smaller trap, not nearly as complex as the endless puzzle that had kept her and Peter walking in circles for hours. But all the Kripkes’ work had a certain taint to it; the chalky taste of magick. She felt it thick and bitter in her throat.
The cat pranced closer, delighted.
Alice stood frozen, nearly blind with terror.
Make it quick, she prayed;rip my neck first, don’t make it hurt—
Then the cat, too, was trapped—Alice saw, by its right paw, a line of chalk stretching around its tail. The cat cocked its head, puzzled, and sank back into a crouch to spring again. This time the trap redoubled. The cat yowled, pained and mystified, as all its kinetic energy went nowhere and ripped against its muscles instead.
Alice and the cat panted, staring at one another. Their faces were mere feet away from each other; the cat strained, desperately hungry, saliva dripping from its jaws onto the swallowing silt. Beneath its matted fur Alice could see the silhouette of the creature it once was; the strain of muscle against bone.What a waste, she thought;all that power, and nowhere to put it. Its eyes were enormous with panic; its pupils nearly disappeared into the green.Help me, it seemed to want to say;please, help me.
“I wish I could,” Alice breathed. “I’m sorry.”
Tucked into the sand between them lay a gleaming bird’s skull. Some invisible wind moved through the hollows of its eyes, and a low cuckoo’s croon floated across the sands. Come, come, it told the Kripkes. Your prey is here.
Alice noticed then the metal buckets lined up all around them, visible now inside the trap’s glamour. She heard a grinding noise above. She glanced up. A set of knives rose inch by inch into the air above them, suspended by some hidden set of pulleys. They reached their apex, then dangled back and forth in the air, calculating. The blades turned toward the cat.
Alice could guess the internal logic. The trap had weighed Alice’s life against the cat’s and decided the cat was worth more; was bigger, carried the most blood. The knives whistled down. It was not a clean slice. They didn’t chop, they gouged. Blood poured, but slowly, and the cat howled piteously, swirling around with claws reached out to Alice as if begging her to help it find release.
But Alice was gone, lost to screaming memories. All she could think of was Peter suffering the same fate; hung up upside down, his life bleeding away into those buckets. For a moment she couldn’t move, terrified as she was—her limbs were floating, distended; a bell-like ringing started at the base of her head and grew louder and louder until she felt her skull shaking with it, until she thought she might burst apart. Oh, if only she could just shatter, if only this would allend—but it kept going on and on, and the terror reached a screaming pitch.
The cat gurgled. Something had ruptured inside, and blood spilled out from between those fangs. The blood did not sink into the sand, but trickled by magick into those buckets; many hot, thick streams racing across the sand. The cat’s spine contorted. It hunched into a ball and then stretched out like a flat line, reaching across the sand. In Alice’s mind rose the idiotic comparison of Belinda’s Norwegian forest cat, a sweet thing named Dame Antonia, who could sprawl like a carpet twice her apparent length.Cats are liquid, she heard with Belinda’s tinkling laughter, and that tinkling grew louder concurrent with the cat’s piteous cries.
At last the buckets were full to brimming, and the cat lay still. There was a horrible grinding noise as the pulleys reset. This time the blades aimed for Alice.
“Think,” she gasped. The sound of her own voice—tinny, fragile, human—brought her back somewhat; rooted her in a sensation that wasn’t her own terror. “Think.”
She crouched low in the sand, scanning for any proof of the pentagram—and there it was, one corner untucked; one word peeking out from the glamour.Chelone.Greek fortortoise.
She made a noise that was half a laugh, half a scream. Zeno, of course. She was frozen in her steps because the Kripkes had inscribed the first of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Achilles races a tortoise but gives him a head start. When Achilles catches up to where the tortoise once was, the tortoise has moved on; he catches up again, but again the tortoise has moved on; and so Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, and motion is physically impossible.
No one did Zeno anymore, Zeno was for freshers. Anyone who walked into an Introduction to Magick seminar knew already that space and time were not infinitely divisible in this way. But down here the Kripkes preyed on starving, senseless creatures. The Kripkes were getting lazy.
She had chalk. She needed blood. She stretched her arm toward the nearest bucket, but her fingers only grazed its side. She took a deep breath, then flung her arm out as far as it would go. Her finger snagged the bucket’s lip. She yanked back; the bucket tipped. Blood pooled over her fingers, soaked the chalk. And the cat’s blood was so rich and fresh, the chalk wrote so cleanly, it took her only seconds to write in mathematical language what amounted to the statement,But for calculus.
Her legs sprang free. Alice jumped and rolled to the side, just as the blades whistled down against nothing.
When she came to, when herpanic ebbed and her pulse slowed, she was ravenous.
The beast’s blood did it. Its stench suffused the air; musky, salty, delicious. She crawled to her knees, and after she’d flung her fingers through the sand and defused the trap for good, she pressed her face against the corpse and moaned.
She couldn’t get enough of it. It wasn’t just the blood and lingering warmth; it was the sheer grossness of the corpse. She had not been around this much living viscera, the moist and squishy components oflife, for so long. Hell starved the senses. All was so clean and quiet down here, sosterile; but the cat’s stench was proof that life was messy, full of blood and guts and gristle. Decomposition meant life. She wanted to roll in that mess; she had the overwhelming urge to dump a bucket over her head, slather the blood all over her face and arms, and wrestle with the corpse until they were one.
Reason prevailed. She set to building a fire.
She had a handful of matches that were still dry, and her notebook pages made good kindling. In short order she had a roaring stable flame. She untied the Kripkes’ knives from their pulley and sawed into the cat’s side until she had several fistfuls of meat. She dug further, and found what looked like a heart and a liver. Organs are healthy, she’d once read; eat those first. All this she skewered on a knife and placed directly into the flames. Let it burn; she didn’t care. She wanted it messy; charcoal and blood and all. She couldn’t wait long enough for the meat to cook through anyway. Once the smell hit her nose her stomach screamed, and she saw herself in her mind’s eye with the same slavering glare the cat had once turned on her. She seized the meat. It burned her fingers; she didn’t notice. The liver she ate quickly. It came apart soft in her teeth. The heart she chewed for a long time, relishing how sore it made her gums. Taste did not matter, she hardly registered it; all that mattered was that the chemicals in her gut could tell it was nutrient-rich biological matter and that it was good.
By then the rest of the meat had cooked, all enticing crackling fat, but Alice’s stomach roiled at the thought of stuffing more inside her. She lay on her back and stared at the sky in a daze.
What a trip.
She would have liked the luxury of having a mental breakdown but unfortunately, now time mattered again. She was hurled back into a schema of change and there was forward momentum now, a destination, things to do and get done. She had to busy herself with whatever happened several hours from now. Futurity! What a concept.
Once her senses came back a bit, she regarded the spread-out carcass. She supposed she could have been more careful about butchering the meat—organs, blood, and flesh lay scattered across the sand, and at this stage she had a hard time telling what was what—but still she was able to salvage entire steaks from the cat’s sides and legs. She didn’t know the first thing about curing meat, but she figured cooked meat would last longer than raw. Provisions for the future. A future. Incredible. She roasted the flesh using the knife as a skewer, staring intently as the crackling meat went from bright red to a hard black. The smell made her ravenous once more. She tore the meat into pieces and ate with gusto, licking fat from burnt fingers.
