Page 4 of Katabasis
Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.
So the next morning after Professor Grimes’s death, once his body was discovered and all the dust had settled, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to begin researching ways to go to Hell.
Peter had a very nice spell-bindingvoice. Alice had always resented this about him, how his voice made hers seem reedy in comparison. She found it particularly disgruntling given how incongruous it was with his stick-thin frame. It seemed unfair such a rich sound could come from that stubbly goose throat. Every now and then a research paper surfaced on why male voices were better suited for magick, citing reasons of pitch, depth, or steadiness, and they always sparked a big hubbub involving outraged statements from women-in-magick societies and apologetic statements from journal editorial boards. Alas, no one had managed to conclusively prove these studies false. Unfortunately, Alice suspected the papers were right, and at this moment she was grateful. Peter’s confidence made her confident in turn, and she found herself lulled along by his smooth, reassuring rumble.
“The target defined as Professor Jacob Grimes,” they intoned in unison. “The destination defined as Hell, or the afterlife, or the Eight Courts, or the domain of Lord Yama the Merciful.”
They finished. Nothing happened. A second passed, then several. Then a freeze suffused the room, a creeping chill from nowhere that cut straight into their bones. Alice shuddered.
“Hand?” Peter offered his palm.
She slapped it away. “Shush.”
“Sorry.” Peter’s hand hung in the air for a moment before he pulled it back, and Alice realized belatedly he might have been asking her to holdhis.
But it was too late. White light flared up from the lines of chalk, forming a silo around them. The lab room vanished. A great rumbling filled the air. Alice reached for Peter’s arm—only for balance, mind—but the ground lurched violently, and she toppled over onto her bum. For a moment she could see nothing, hear nothing over the roaring column. She felt a hooking sensation in her chest—not painful, onlysharp, like some ghostly hand had reached in and yanked her heart out from between her ribs. The pressure was overwhelming. She could not breathe. She curled in on herself, hoping desperately she hadn’t fallen out of the pentagram. The rumble grew and the light brightened to a blinding white, burning through her eyelids. Visions of apocalypse exploded in her mind’s eye, oceans of blood beneath tongues of fire, planets collapsing into black holes, and for a brief, terrifying moment she was lost in the eruption, she forgot who she was—
She scrambled for her catechisms.
I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick—
The light faded. The rumbling ceased.
Blinking, Alice turned her hands over before her eyes. She felt fine. Her skin was coated with a thin layer of ash, so that she looked dyed in gray, but it brushed away easily enough. She patted her chest. Her heart was in place. Her limbs were intact. Her entrails still stacked neatly inside her. If the price was paid, she couldn’t feel it. All she felt then was a wild, burning elation. It had worked, she had done it, it worked. Chalk, dirt, hours of research—and then one world slipped into another. She had wrought this. A miracle.
Peter stood up, coughing. He brushed an ash-covered clump of hair out of his eyes. “So this is Hell.”
Alice peered about in wonder. All around them were gray fields, endless plains under a dark red sky. A sun—theirsun? a shadow, a twin?—hung low and ponderous, its light maddeningly dim. She breathed in deep. She had brought a cloth mask, in case the air reeked. In Virgil’sAeneid, the Greeks had named HellAornos, “the place that is birdless,” for none could fly over its foul breath. But the air smelled of nothing but dust, and the temperature was just this side of chilly. She’d expected more tortured screaming, sulfur, and brimstone, but it turned out that perhaps the American theologists had been exaggerating. Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.
She slung her rucksack over her shoulders. A faint dark mass loomed in the distance and there, she assumed, lay the Fields of Asphodel.
“You all right?” Peter asked.
“Never better.” Alice stepped out of the pentagram. “Shall we?”
On Magick
Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.
What magicians of ancient civilizations discovered through accident and ingenuity, and what the English philosopher-magicians of the eighteenth century onward codified into the Euro-American received canon, was that the natural laws of the world were set but fragile. You could cleverly reinterpret them. For brief periods of time one could even bewilder and suspend them, so long as you spun the right web of untruths. Linguistic trickery, logical conundrums, it all worked. All you had to do was find a set of premises that, even if just for a split second, made the world seem other than what it really was. The chalk, and whatever remnants of living-dead magical energy lay in the pulverized shells of those sea creatures that perished millions of years ago, did the rest.
Now, magick had progressed a lot since, say, the primitive rituals suggested by the Uffington chalk inscriptions, and there had since been a proliferation of flashy subfields that in fact had nothing to do with chalk, but rather all sorts of arcane objects, enchanted music, and visual illusions. One could now study the archaeology of magick, the history of magick, the music of magick, and on and on. Over in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage. In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and poststructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound. But all the best magick was still done at Cambridge, and good, traditionalist Cambridge was dedicated to the bare bones of the art. Analytic magick. Chalk, surface, paradox.
The paradox—the crucial element. The wordparadoxcomes from two Greek roots:para, meaning “against,” anddoxa, meaning “belief.” The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.
Take, for instance, the Sorites Paradox. Imagine a heap of sand. Very simple. To remove one grain of sand from the heap does not make it any less a heap. Neither does removing two. You could sit there with tweezers for hours, but you would not have diminished the heap. What if you remove a thousand grains? A million? Precisely how many grains of sand must you remove before it is no longer a heap? If you sit cross-legged with a pair of tweezers, plucking out the sand one grain at a time, what is the precise moment when you will succeed in your demolition of the heap? No one can name this moment. But if the difference between the heap and the heap-minus-one is minuscule, how can you ever transform a heap into a not-heap?
Come on. You know very well what a heap is. You know it when you see it. It is like porn. And you know that if you shovel giant piles of sand out of the heap, there will come a moment when you can definitely call it not-a-heap.
But just for that moment, when the paradox is laid out to you in that precise wording, you don’t know. For a moment, you think it is true—that it is impossible, indeed, to turn a heap into a not-heap. In fact you are probably so exhausted from hearing the wordheapthat the very concept is a blank to you.
Confusion, doubt. And with that, for just a moment, the world blinks. The heap does not run out.
It was this blink that had seduced Alice to her field. In her freshman year of college she took an Introduction to Logic class. In their second week, they were treated to a magick demonstration. A visiting postdoc stood before the lecture hall and drew a chalk circle around a small pile of sand on a table. “Watch,” he said, and reached in to scoop a handful away. He did this again, and again, and again. He invited the class to line up and, one by one, try to empty the pile with their hands. They tried; they couldn’t. Each time their hands left the circle, the space around the pile blurred, and the sand did not diminish.
Alice watched the sand spill from her fingers, and something knocked over in her chest.
She could not breathe. Now, here was a miracle. Here was Jesus, turning five loaves and two fish into an endless supply. All the fields she had considered for her major—maths, physics, medicine, history—they all fell away, they seemed so irrelevant, for why would you study static truths when truth had just exited left? She felt it then. She felt it every time. The stomach-dropping awe, the wondrous delight of a child at a circus who’d just seen a rabbit disappear. Through all her years of study, this feeling never went away. You thought the world was one way and then it wasn’t. One could become zero. One could become two. A blink of an eye, and the fact of the matter was not. If the world could be fluid for you once, how many more times could you make it dance according to your whims?
