Page 145 of Katabasis
“It’s tragic, obviously.” Professor Grimes waved a hand. “But let’s look forward. It’s opened up possibilities.”
He said something else, but Alice did not hear.
Something clicked shut in her then. It was the strangest feeling. Indeed it made her a little giddy. She had never before exercised the ability to simply drown him out.
Coolly she looked him up and down.
She’d never looked upon Professor Grimes so frankly. She’d always felt like she was looking into the sun, somewhat; she felt that she couldn’t look him directly in the face, or she’d burn away. But she had witnessed divinity now. The mundane did not compare. Now, in the afterlife, she saw him more clearly than ever; in part because she was no longer so scared of looking, and in part because she saw only what he chose to show. Just an ordinary man, puffing himself up, darting around for any way out of his predicament. Cruel, callous—and so, so full of unjustified assumptions.
Truly, he had put so little effort into keeping himself together. All fierce expression and no substance. He was less a menacing shroud than unformed brushstrokes of gray. Even the newly dead Shades she’d encountered in Asphodel had better definition than that. Professor Grimes was not good at being dead, did not have the fortitude of mind, hadn’t comecloseto conquering Hell, and Alice found this deeply disappointing. It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants, and they devastated you by being so human.
This was the saddest thing. The loss of faith. If he really were a giant, she would have followed him still.
“Was that all?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“Was that everything you wanted to say?”
He faltered. “Well, Alice—”
“May I speak, then?”
She clutched the Dialetheia tight with one arm. With the other, she reached around and dug her notebook out of her rucksack. She flipped several pages, then spun the notebook around and held it up before Professor Grimes. “You know what this does, surely.”
He bent over to read. “Erichtho?” He frowned. “What is this? Did you summon spirits from below to help you?”
“No,” said Alice. “It’s what I would have done to you. I only mean to show you my work.”
She tossed the notebook to the ground. She knew he could decipher her work at a glance. He had probably worked through something very similar already.
“I would have anchored your soul back to your body. I would have stitched your throat back to your lungs and suspended the muscles around them from electromagnetic wires. I would have tethered you as a talking head inside a wooden frame and not let you go, no matter how much you screamed, until I got everything I needed out of you.”
His smile faltered. She saw it falter—only for a moment, but this gave her an absurd burst of pride, the fact that after everything, she had managed to shock him after all.
“So.” She swallowed. “There.”
Professor Grimes loomed over the sheets, reading in silence.
She was so familiar with this silence. She had sat so many times in his office, fingers twisting nervously in her lap while he read through pages of her work. She knew he liked to let the silence linger. It was an intimidation tactic. He’d told her as much, he did it all the time to journalists, to colleagues he disliked. Once his silence had terrified her. Now she felt a fierce, hot pleasure, knowing he was silent only because he was scrambling for a way to respond.
At last he said, “That won’t possibly work.”
“It does,” she assured him. “It’s how I vanquished Nick Kripke.”
How dare he, she thought. Making impingements, implying failure, when he had no grounds to do so except for being a dick. The Erichtho spell was some of the best work she’d ever done. Cracking the portal to Hell, uncovering Erichtho’s footsteps, making sense of the rotted archives, all of it. Truly this was top-notch scholarship. When Alice really thought about it, this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her—made her doubt she was a good scholar. He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own.
“I can’t believe you thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “I mean—you absolute clown—how would you evenknow?”
He’d lost her. He knew it. “Now look, Law—”
She dropped to her knees and smoothed her fingers across the ground. The sand here felt different from the sand in the Eight Courts; different even from the islands’ shores. Grittier, the grains larger, more like the grains in the world above. Not nearly so silky, dreamlike, smooth.
“Don’t.” A note of fear crept into Professor Grimes’s voice. “Alice. Let’s not be so drastic.”
“I won’t,” said Alice. “I thought I wanted that, once. It’s all I dreamed about. But now I think—I’d just like an exchange.”
She drew a little stick from her pocket. It was Elspeth’s chalk—Alice’s last stick had turned to a useless clump in the Lethe. Shropley’s Standard, alas, but Peter had also preferred Shropley’s, and since this work was all his, Alice figured she stood a better chance. Magicians had theories about that. The best chalk for a spell was the chalk the originator used. A superstition, probably, but still this made her feel safe; made Peter’s memory more vivid. She traced a little line against the sand and held her breath, watching, waiting.
