Page 91 of Katabasis
“Eric-who?”
“Erichtho.”
“Never heard of her.”
“You wouldn’t have. She’s tricky, Erichtho. Always lingering on the margins, never in the main archives. It seems to me she was a fairly accomplished magician, only everyone in her time found her arts too freakish and frightful to document properly. I never would have heard of her at all, except I—well, by the time we got over here, I’d started digging into some pretty odd stuff.”
She flipped backward in her notebook. “You see, I started with Dante. Virgil cites Erichtho as the one who bade him journey into Lower Hell and report back to her all that he found. And from Dante I got over to Virgil, and from Virgil I got into acrostics. And I learned about these ruins, see, called the Colossi of Memnon. They’re these two colossal statues in Thebes built to guard the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, but they’ve been associated with the Trojan king Memnon since antiquity. For thousands of years, every morning at dawn, these statues have emitted a high-pitched cry. We don’t know what causes it. Maybe it’s the heat of the sun expanding the rocks so the wind hits them at just the right angle. But it’s believed the sound is the dying Memnon crying out to his mother, Eos, the goddess of dawn. And I started wondering whether the Colossi of Memnon held some chalk inscription that allows communication from the underworld.”
She wasn’t sure her ramblings made any sense—it was all a jumble of associated concepts flung together from days of frenzied research—but Peter nodded patiently. “And what did you find?”
“Acrostics, mostly. I couldn’t very well drop everything and go to Egypt, but Ididfind all these photographs hidden in some personal collections, and I found all these Greek and Latin inscriptions that visitors over the years had left on the statues.Proskynemata.Religious writings. They were all lightly encrypted, and they all made use of basic acrostics magick. Small spells to send messages to their loved ones or to wish their loved ones peace in death, I don’t know. But I did see that one name kept coming up over and over again. Erichtho.”
“This is a fantastic rabbit hole,” said Peter.
“Quite.” Alice laughed sharply. “I know, I’m sorry. But you know how when you’re running yourself ragged on a research project and nothing sticks and then you find that one thing that holds promise? Like it’s glowing, calling out to you? Like a single star in a dark sky?”
Peter nodded. “It’s a lifeline.”
“Right. You cling to it with everything you’ve got. Because there’s nothing else.”
Erichtho was the only name that held significance for Alice those days, the only hope of an answer. She would wake up from unwilling sleep with the dreadful task of Orpheus before her, and amidst the gray dead ends of all the scholarship in centuries past only Erichtho gleamed like Ariadne’s string, leading somewhere unknown—but at leastsomewhere.
“So then I went searching in the Greek archives. It took forever to track down any manuscripts of hers, as they weren’t even classified in the magick library, but finally I found some old scraps of papyrus that are carbon-dated to Thessaly. And then I sat withthosefor a while, and I realized Erichtho was playing around with the same divergent series that modern Tartarologists were obsessed with. And that it’s possible, back centuries ago, that Erichtho arrived separately at the same thing we’d call—”
“Ramanujan’s Summation,” said Peter.
“Precisely. The same mechanism that let us come to Hell in the first place.” Alice turned the page and tapped a drawing of a pentagram, one very similar to the one that had sent them to Hell; only two crucial names were placed elsewhere. “So there’s my solution. But instead of sending a physical object to new coordinates, I would have bound a soul to separate coordinates and brought it back to earth.”
“I don’t follow,” said Peter.
Alice hesitated. It all seemed too horrible to say out loud, so she opted for the classic magician’s approach, which was to phrase everything in the clinical terms of a journal abstract. “In Dante’sInferno, Erichtho is passingly mentioned as the one other person who has sent Virgil into the depths of Hell. Scholars are divided on what Dante was trying to accomplish with this mention. Some think it’s to reassure the reader that Virgil knows his way around Lower Hell; others think it’s to emphasize Virgil’s paganism by associating him with witchcraft.
“Either way, here Dante is drawing from a more elaborate anecdote in Lucan’sPharsalia, in which the Thessalian witch Erichtho is asked by the Roman general Sextus Pompey to divine the outcome of the Battle of Pharsalus. And she does.” She hugged her arms around her chest. “She drags a corpse off the battlefield and forces its soul to return to its mangled body, to deliver to Sextus a prophecy. It is a horrible spell. The soul is not living nor dead; he speaks through his former body, but only with great effort. He cannot live life as he used to; but neither can he die, for his soul is trapped. Eventually Erichtho frees his soul by burning his body on a pyre.”
Peter said nothing. If he knew where this was all going, he didn’t show it; he only kept watching her, inscrutable.
“And that’s what I would have done to Grimes.” Alice’s arms tightened around her chest, like a closing trap, like she could squeeze herself into nothing if she tried hard enough. “I would have put him back in that corpse. I would have filled it with all sorts of unnatural shit to keep it together, and kept the spell going long enough that the mechanics of his vocal cords and tongue could move, could say all the things I needed it to say. I would have kept it at my complete mercy. I wouldn’t have given Grimes a second life at all. I would have made him into my toy and pet and made him beg for release.”
Peter remained ever polite, curious. “And how would you have done that?”
“Oh, all the witchy things. The froth of slain mad dogs. Lynx’s entrails. Sea leeches. All the monstrous things of nature. Lucan is very descriptive.”
“Oh my.”
Alice cleared her throat. “And also I dug him up.”
“There it is.”
“There wasn’t much to dig up, anyways.”
“I’m sure.”
“But see, it works because you’re not trying to bring the soul back,” Alice said. The rest she said as quickly as she could; robotic, just reading out the summary. “You can dispense with the cosmological problems of life and death and reanimation and all that, because this version of Grimes doesn’t get to interact with the living anymore. He wouldn’t be properly alive. He’d just be a voice. An imprint. He’d be mine. All mine. Mything. Mine to play with, or experiment on, or interrogate, or even—just—Lock him in a closet, and forget about him for years.”
Well, there it was. She loosed a breath, lifted her chin, and awaited judgment.
“I see.” Peter tilted his head. “That’s—hm. Fascinating.”
