Page 5 of Katabasis
Everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall once again.
All it took was to tell a lie—and to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all the rules could be suspended. You held a conclusion in your head and believed, through sheer force of will, that everything else was wrong. You had to see the world as it was not.
Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired. She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward. She believed that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain. She believed that when professors snapped at you, when they belittled and misused you, it was because they cared. And she believed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that she was all right, that everything was all right, that she did not need help, that she could just stiffen her upper lip and keep on going.
She believed these things with all her might, with the same delirium it took to keep a heap of sand from ever running out. She had no choice. It was essential practice for everything that came after.
Chapter Two
Hell stretched. Alice and Peter walked side by side over sand so silky-fine their footprints left hardly any marks. Indeed, the sand seemed to actively erase them as they walked on. She glanced over her shoulder and saw her footprints left first indiscernible outlines, then, three steps on and another glance back, nothing at all. It appeared that Hell’s landscape resisted alteration. No matter where Alice looked, she could detect no landmarks—no hills, no shores, no foreboding clouds. She tried not to let this bother her. Hell, she had read, was an inconstant and shifting plane. Its landmarks were conceptual, not fixed. She did not know quite what this meant, but following scholarly convention she interpreted this as,Hell reveals itself to you in whatever order it sochooses.
Hell, for now, chose rolling dunes.
Alice longed for sunlight. Her eyes had adjusted now to the dim, though they ached from squinting. She rubbed her temples and hoped she’d grow used to this eternal dusk.
Around twenty minutes later, they crossed under a bridge. At first they heard it rather than saw it: chatter overhead, voices Alice almost recognized. She looked up and saw in the sky a mirror image of Cambridge, the campus turned upside-down and shudderingly translucent, as if projected across a staticky cable connection. She saw Jesus Green, Sidney Street, and the little winding alleys between St. John’s and Trinity. She saw postgrads on their bicycles, weaving around cars. She saw little black masses moving quickly in clusters from one building to the next. Undergraduates, precious things, new and still-creased black robes flapping around their heels.
So this was the Viewing Pavilion. Alice had read about this: first in Penhaligon’sPrimer on the Unitarian Hell, and then corroborated by most ancient Chinese sources. Here was the bridge that all souls crossed before they passed into the Underworld for good; the liminal point between the worlds of the living and dead where each side could just barely glimpse the other.
A thought crossed Alice’s mind. She squinted. Yes—if she cast her thoughts outward, she could zoom in to that mirror Cambridge and tunnel into the Graduate Lab Seven, where her and Peter’s pentagram remained, their writing smudged and in parts eviscerated by winds blown from the boundaries between worlds. She saw two of her colleagues—Belinda and Michele—standing reverently at the door, peering around, slowly piecing together what had just happened.
She hadn’t erased her tracks. No, rather the contrary: she’d left a note in her office announcing that she was off to retrieve Professor Grimes’s soul from Hell, that no one should dare follow for the danger was so great, and that if she hadn’t returned in fourteen days then they could go ahead and reassign her corner office to one of the first-years. She’d left the lab door unlocked. She wanted everyone to know where she had gone, if only so that when she returned in triumph, Professor Grimes in hand, there would be no doubts about her success.
Belinda and Michele were now kneeling by the outside of the pentagram, stooping low to read the inscriptions. Alice wished she could hear what they were saying. Belinda kept pressing her hand against her mouth. Michele responded with some gestures that were either very agitated or simply very Italian; with Michele, Alice had never been able to tell which. Suddenly Belinda paused—she stood right over the inscription that designated their destination as Hell—and craned her neck to read.
Alice reached up as far as she could with one hand. The bridge was very close—a low ceiling she couldjusttouch, if she strained her arm and teetered on her tiptoes. Could she cross it? She wanted to try.
“Boo.”
Belinda shuddered; her hand flew to her neck. Alice was delighted. She wondered at the limits of ghostly mischief—whether, if she wanted to, she might simply haunt the halls of Cambridge forever.
Scholars concurred that most hauntings on record were facilitated through the Viewing Pavilion. It was the only place from which the dead could make their voices heard, from which they might exert some pressure on the living. But it was a dual kind of haunting. Ghosts lingered around the Viewing Pavilion because they were too enraptured with scenes from their lifetime; because they, in turn, were entranced and obsessed with the rituals of the living. They wanted to know what everyone was up to. They wanted to see whether they’d been remembered. All the ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.
Belinda stumbled into Michele’s arms. Alice snorted. What an English rose Belinda was—everything was always too much for her. Michele wrapped his arms around Belinda, speaking into her ear. Alice guessed at his words—It’s all right, they haven’t died—they’re not going to die. Belinda kept shaking her head.No, she seemed to say.No, they’re dead, they’re gone.
“Having regrets?” Peter stood beside her, neck craned up. Though his eyes were not on Belinda and Michele, but the flocks of undergraduates bustling happily down the alley. Oblivious, excited for the start of term—or was their first day of classes over, were they now filtering into the college bar for a pint? “Want to head back?”
“Don’t joke, Murdoch.”
There was no simple path out of Hell. They both knew this coming in. Entering Hell was easy; leaving was hard. If only they could just jump up into their pentagram, say their spells in reverse, and plop right back where they had begun. But if that were possible, the living could visit their dead all the time. No; to ascend from Hell required the permission of Lord Yama—that was, Thanatos, Anubis, Hades, the Darkness of Many Names, Ruler of the Underworld.
Often he granted it. Lord Yama did not like to suffer the living in his realm; they disturbed the dead, they upset the balance. He was more than happy to shoo them back off to whence they’d come. At least, all the stories promised so. Orpheus had made his way back, for better or worse. Dante ascended with no trouble at all. In all the stories, sojourners in Hell rarely perished there. It was in the world of the living where they met their tragic ends.
In any case, they could sort out the problem of living when they crossed that bridge. For now, the trouble was determining how much deeper in to go.
An hour later the ground begansloping upward. They were climbing something, though it wasn’t immediately clear what. Alice’s lungs grew tight, though she tried not to pant. Peter loped on beside her, completely unfazed, and she was too embarrassed to admit she was tired.
Then it was all revealed beneath them: a flat valley filled with Shades upon Shades, some grouped in clusters, some wandering the fields alone. Those were dead souls—translucent gray things, mere echoes of living bodies. Some went round and round in circles; some paced along the same tight trip. Some meandered, drifting more than walking. From high above it was like watching a colony of sluggish, dazed ants, moving with no purpose. Only an endless milling. Limbo, by one name. By another, the Fields of Asphodel.
The fields were not a court of Hell, only a holding area. Here lingered the shocked, disoriented souls of the recently deceased. Here they had infinite space and time to find their bearings before they decided to move on. Talamo’s monograph described the Fields of Asphodel as a waiting zone. Not so different from the lobby at Cambridge South, only there was no coffee kiosk, and everyone was still deciding whether they wanted to get on the train.
Alice had good reason to think Professor Grimes might still be here. On the whole, the dead were not typically eager to move on. They needed time to process their memories, their regrets, their wishes. Some stayed in hopes of reuniting with loved ones before they sought reincarnation together. Some didn’t believe in reincarnation at all. Some waited in the fields forever out of conviction that the great resurrection was coming, and that they need only sink into a stupor and wait for the end times. Others remained out of sheer terror of what the rest of Hell might hold, for an eternity of boredom was better than the punishments they deserved.
Professor Grimes, in Alice’s view, had quite a lot to atone for. If she were him, she would stay put.
But how would they ever find him in such a crowd? The fields stretched on as far as the eye could see, and not a single one of these souls was recognizable to Alice’s eyes. Even after they descended down into the valley, into the crowds, the Shades appeared as vague and indistinct as they had looked from a distance. Alice scrutinized every soul she passed but saw only blurry silhouettes, most of them faceless, expressions uniformly dour if not. She could never get close enough to get a better look. The dead flitted away every time they came close, like gnats swarming off from waving hands.
“Remind me what you used for an anchor?” Peter asked after a while.
