Page 42 of Katabasis
“But we’ve got to make sure. I mean...” He leaned forward, his eyes huge with concern. “Don’t you want to be sure?”
Alicewassure. She’d been probing her thoughts ever since they sat down, looking for gaps. But the pain in her skull had faded now, and nothing had gone with it. Her memory was like a badly locked trunk, straining at the clinch, always full to bursting. She would know if something had leaked, she thought. She would have felt the release. “Nothing’s gone, I promise.”
“But how do youknow?”
She hesitated.
Don’t you tell anyone.This memory was very vivid. Professor Grimes had only said it once, but once was enough. But how else to explain? She did not want Peter splashing about the Lethe, forhewas certainly not immune.
It would get her in terrible trouble. But she thought of Peter’s outburst in the Court of Desire, that inexplicable anger—and thought perhaps, out of anyone, Peter might understand.
“I think I’m immune,” she said. “To the Lethe.”
“Immunehow?”
She trailed her fingers against the sand. It was so hard to say this out loud. She had been so practiced at saying nothing out loud; it was hard, actually, to find and then speak the right words. Her first impulse was to dance around the truth. “Well, I don’t forget things.”
“We’ve all got good memories, Law, but theLethe—”
“No, I mean that Ican’tforget things.”
“What does that even—”
“Look.” She rolled up her left sleeve and shifted so that he could see the skin around her upper arm. “This won’t let me.”
He looked. Then breathed in, so sharply that Alice blinked and turned away.
Etched in her flesh, in neat white script in a perfect circle, was a permanent pentagram.
Magick never lasted forever. You drew a sphere of influence, you put an object inside, and when you were finished with the spell, you took the object back out. The most talented magicians could create enchantments that lasted hours, even weeks in the case of Perpetual Flasks, but you always needed to bring objects back to the pentagram once they’d lost their charge. What’s more, pentagrams were written in chalk, not ink; by nature, they could not last long. They were under constant threat from vacuum cleaners, brooms, a gust of wind, a sneeze. Every stroke of every letter in a pentagram mattered, and the slightest smudge negated all the hard work of inscribing it in the first place. The best magicians erased their work at the end of every day to prevent accidents the next morning. It was a massive waste of chalk, but there was no way around it. Magick was ephemeral. You fooled the world for a breath, and then everything went back to the way it was before.
Professor Grimes had made it his career’s work to defy this one basic rule of magick. He wanted to keep the lie going. And he had proven, with Alice, that pentagrams etched in living human skin might keep their charge for a lifetime. Or at least a year and counting—which was all they knew so far.
Peter stared at the tattoo for a long time. He lifted his hands, and when she nodded permission, he poked and prodded, kneading her skin with his fingers. At last he said, “That’s not your handwriting.”
“No. Guess whose.”
Something unreadable passed over his face. “He made you?”
“I wanted to,” she said, and felt a hot vicious thrum in her chest. Yes, this was right, she knew this was true. “I let him.”
This was how Alice and ProfessorGrimes spent that summer in Italy.
He had started with animals. First rats and guinea pigs, and then cats and dogs shaved down to trembling skin. Animal research rules were laxer in Europe; the streets were littered with strays. Alice spent hours holding cats in place while he worked the tattoo needle over their shaved, bare skin. She’d been in charge of disposing of the corpses, too; she became familiar with everyspazzinocollection point in Venice.
But the problem with animal experimentation was that there was only so much that lesser creatures coulddo. You could make them run in circles, or withstand tests of hunger or pain, but in the end you didn’t really know how much of an impact you’d made. Who cared if a cat remembered which cup a treat was in? Something more expressive would be better. Something that, at least, could talk—that could tell you what the injection of living-dead energydidto a body. Whether it felt like nothing, whether it burned you up from the inside.
Alice always knew it’d be her turn under the needle down the line. Professor Grimes had made no pretensions otherwise. She had freely given her fully informed consent from the beginning, and in her opinion, that made it all fine. It put her in control. And she trusted Professor Grimes to do it safely, to do it well.
She was so good, both during the procedure and the night before. She didn’t let on how scared she was; how she was having second thoughts. She knew this would only annoy him. When she sobbed from fear she did it in the privacy of her hotel room. Oh, but she did not want to die. She did not want to lose her mind. But she kept this to herself. In the morning she was calm, placid, docile. A perfect blank tablet.
She kept reminding herself:It’s been two whole weeks since we killed a cat.
He offered her anesthetic before they began, but she refused even a local injection. She knew it was important that she keep talking, responding, throughout the procedure. She had to stay alert, to catalog every part of the experience. She needed to feel every dip of the needle into her skin, every burn of living-dead chalk.
He’d been so kind, so encouraging, as he worked across her skin. He stroked her shoulder every time she flinched, murmuring low, soothing assurances. “You’re grand. You’re doing so well. Sit still for me, darling. That’s it. We’re almost done.” He stopped when the pain became too much; he let her take as many breaks as she needed. And when he closed the circle and she dropped to her knees, moaning as the living-dead energy rushed through her body, he bent down with her and rubbed circles into her back and gathered her hair behind her head as she vomited blood across the floor.
The experiment was a great success.
