Page 7 of Katabasis
Archimedes blinked, his tail swishing back and forth around his legs. He circled round the fire and gave it a sniff. If he was bothered to be in Hell, he did not show it.
“Catscancross boundaries,” Alice said in a hushed tone. “I read about this! They know the courts, they can see the dead.”
“Can you help us, then?” Peter approached the cat. “Can you bring us to Grimes?”
For a moment Archimedes seemed to consider this. His eyes lingered on the fire for a long time, such a long time that Alice felt a swell of hope—he did look so wise, his gaze so significant.I have crossed oceans of time, said those eyes.I have seen the hidden world.Then he mewed in a very scornful way and streaked back over the dunes.
Alice stood up. “Useless.”
“Look,” said Peter.
Where Archimedes had disappeared, four figures now appeared on the horizon. Slight, tentative shapes. None with the tall, imposing grace of Professor Grimes. They drew closer, and the soft light of their faces became clear under the low, burning sun. Innocent things. Children still. Mottled patches of black spread across their skin like ink stains.
“Peter.” Alice had a sinking feeling. “That isn’t...”
“Oh, dear,” said Peter. “I thought they’d have passed on by now.”
“Apparently not,” said Alice, and braced herself to meet Professor Grimes’s first victims.
Thirty years ago at Cambridge, aspell went awry and four undergraduates died. The postdoc on duty was stripped of his degrees and banished back home to Bristol in disgrace. All involved parties were students of the then-young Professor Jacob Grimes.
Officially, the university blamed the deaths on a building fire—which was not technically false, because the resulting explosion had burned down the entire left wing—and sent the students’ ashes home to their parents, along with a letter assuring them that Cambridge was not in any way responsible, and that litigation would be a very bad idea. Conveniently an investigation revealed some faulty construction in the gas pipes, which allowed the university to place the blame on building codes and contractor malfeasance, not on what types of magical experiments could burn down half a building in the first place. All this meant the department was never blamed for what happened. It was a freak accident, nothing more.
But no one ever asked why Professor Grimes let a fire rip through the lab to begin with. No one ever considered that, as a supervisor responsible for both the intellectual development and the safety of his students, Professor Grimes should have been paying attention to the progress of the experiment instead of being burrowed away in his third-floor office, a formidable “DO NOT ENTER” sign hung over his door. (He was so proud of that sign; a graduating cohort had presented it to him as a joke, and he had accepted it without irony.) No one ever suggested that perhaps, in addition to doing his research, Professor Grimes should have been fulfilling his duties as a teacher. He wasn’t the only neglectful professor, after all—all the faculty in the department cut corners when it came to teaching duties. Why waste time babysitting undergraduates when one could work on literally anything else?
So none of this had any effect on Professor Grimes’s career. No one could prove it was his fault. You couldn’t draw a line between his actions and the fire. He hadn’t even been present. And anyhow, accidents were very common in magick. Just two weeks later an enchanted harp recovered from Assyria put half of Harvard’s department into a paralyzed slumber, and this greatly overshadowed the Cambridge fire on the conference gossip circuit. (No counter-spells were effective; the cure at last involved enormous amounts of amphetamine, which a surprising number of grad students had in ready supply.) It was generally agreed that magick required taking risks—especially the visionary, field-defining magick for which Professor Grimes was known. In any case, it was the undergraduates’ own fault, and they were dead already. That was punishment enough.
As the Shades approached, Alice observedwith horror that their appearances seemed locked onto their bodies in the moment of death. One of them seemed mostly intact—she had just a few scratches on her face and arms. One student died of smoke inhalation, said the report. The flames never touched her. She’d crawled into a corner and hidden under a fireproof tarp, and according to the firefighters this was why no one had found her until nearly an hour after the fire was put out. She might have been alive a long time—no one knew for sure, and no one pressed the issue. Her parents held an open-casket funeral in Ely and invited the entire department. This was before Alice’s time, but she was fairly sure Professor Grimes wouldn’t have gone.
The others were burned beyond recognition. It turned Alice’s stomach to look at them. It was one thing to read theories of the dead; witnessing them was quite another. Charred limbs, petrified faces; jawbones stripped clean of flesh, teeth stretched, rictus-like, in unwilling smiles. Only the eyes were uniformly unscarred; staring, pleading, plaintive, curious eyes. Did they spend all eternity like that? Or had they only chosen to present themselves as such for now? The literature on Shades and corporeality was scant and undecided. Some scholars thought Shades were preserved unwillingly as they were in the moment of their death. Others argued Shades had the agency to manifest however they liked. Either way Alice felt it rude to ask.
“Hello,” she said cautiously. “We’re from Cambridge.”
The Shades shuffled closer. They seemed quite excited. Alice could not read the faces of the burnt three—they could never stop smiling—but the more intact girl’s expression was open, delighted.
“We’re looking for a soul who’s only recently passed over,” said Peter. “Professor Jacob Grimes.”
The more intact girl gasped, and the sound spread across the Shades like wind across rocks.
“Professor Grimes?”
“Professor Grimes is here?”
“Grimes!”
So they could speak. Their voices were each an echo of the others’; one statement repeated four times in slightly different registers. Alice could not tell if Shades could speak no other way, or if, after decades clustered together and facing down infinity, their personalities had blended and congealed so that they no longer knew themselves as distinct from the others. They descended into excited chatter, communing among themselves in unintelligible clacks and whistles. All Alice could make out was, “Grimes,” “No way,” and “Mother of God!”
“Do you have any idea where he might be?” Peter cut in.
“Should still be a Shade,” said a girl with braids.
“Yes, a Shade, unless—”
“Unless!”
“But we wouldn’t know.”
“Doesn’t talk to us.”
