Page 97 of Katabasis
Peter had never in his life had people refuse to listen to him, so he barged into Professor Grimes’s office that very afternoon with full confidence he could set this right.
“That’s my research.” He slammed the draft manuscript on the desk between them. “Those are my ideas.”
“And what very good ideas they are.” Professor Grimes leaned back in his chair. “Welcome back, Mr. Murdoch. Care to explain where you’ve been?”
Peter pointed to the byline. “Why aren’t I a coauthor?”
“Perhaps because you didn’t author any of it.”
“This is theft.”
“Is that so?”
“I could report you.
“Would you, now?”
“There’s procedures,” Peter sputtered. “I could go to the board—”
“And saywhat, precisely? That you wrote this paper? You did not. That I stole your ideas? I did not.” Professor Grimes’s voice grew louder; the whole room seemed to shrink. “From my point of view, Mr. Murdoch, you were a happy collaborator until you quit. You haven’t signed in to the lab since January. I have called and written many times, to no response. You have offered no explanation and no apologies. You dropped off the face of the map for over a month and expected me to do nothing with our findings?”
I’ve been sick, Peter wanted to say,I’ve been in a hospitalbed, having diseased tissue cut out of me. But an entire lifetime of denial—the anticipated disbelief; the conviction that, despite everything, he was exaggerating his own suffering for special treatment—stifled his words, and his tongue stuck in his throat.
“Listen, Murdoch. I will make many excuses for talent. Great minds work at their own tempos. I know this. But you are getting lazy. And laziness does not get you published inArcana. It gets you expelled.”
What defense could Peter make? Guilty, guilty on all accounts—he had not been diligent enough; he had not met his deadlines; he had not overcome. A weak body was just the same thing as a weak mind; either might afflict you, and both disqualified you from genius.
He slunk out of the office, head bowed. The lab outside was silent; everyone was looking at him. Alice met his eyes; she stepped forward, as if to speak. But Peter’s vision had narrowed to a pinprick around the door, and he brushed past her as if she were not there.
Peter could only attribute what hedid next to childish pride.
To add insult to injury, Professor Grimes had asked Peter to contribute the proofs to the final drafts. A portion of each publication needed to involve documentation of multiple repetitions of each pentagrammic component before you could activate them with a human subject, and then documentation of multiple repetitions of all human-based iterations. This meant Peter had to go over his own stolen research with a red pen, and report back on all the mistakes he might have overlooked. Of course Peter agreed; no one could refuse a direct request from Professor Grimes and keep their funding. But this did not mean he needed to do a good job.
He swore to God—he never meant to hurt anyone. The most malicious thought he ever held was that it might be nice to embarrass the professor. He knew Grimes did not double-check his own work; it was an open secret that Grimes had long gotten sloppy at details, would never finish a paper if it weren’t for an army of assistants looking things up for him. In Peter’s imagination, all this culminated in some grand public embarrassment at the summer conference of the Royal Academy of Magick perhaps, when Professor Grimes got booed and laughed off the stage for making mistakes an undergraduate would have caught.
And really, Peter’s dominant motivation was just not to spend more time on the paper than Professor Grimes deserved. Why bother, if he wasn’t getting any credit?
So he went through the whole stack in a single night, propped up in bed, half-heartedly scribbling corrections in the margins. He didn’t bother with retracing every pentagrammic iteration; it took so much bloody time, and required so many back-translations from Latin and Greek. Briefly he skimmed the algorithms—some other postgrad had put it all together, he was sure everything was fine—and scribbled at the top:Looks good. Minor corrections, see below. Can continue.
Then he trudged back to the department, dropped the draft in Professor Grimes’s tray, and left without thinking twice.
As soon as he reached thedepartment the next morning, he knew. Police cars and fire trucks were parked all round the front entrance. Caution tape covered the doors and windows; an officer stood by the front door, warding off anyone who tried to get in. Peter stood among the crowd, heart pounding as he watched uniformed figures emerge from inside. Two med techs came out bearing an empty stretcher.
“There’s no point,” he heard an EMT say. “We’d need a bucket.”
By then the whole department was gathered outside. Their whispering grew frantic; voices swelled, theories flew as they counted who was among them and who wasn’t. A gaggle of undergraduates were so distressed they’d started crying. “Who’s in charge here?” Helen Murray kept shouting. “What’s going on? Can’t someone tell us what’s happened?”
Peter pushed his way back through the crowd, stumbled home, and threw up all over his sink.
Several solutions crossed his mind that night.
He did consider killing himself. He spun out all the scenarios in his head. Hanging, ovens, cyanide apples—what demanded the least amount of effort? Probably the oven, except the graduate cottage only had a shared oven and it was too low to the ground for him to get his head comfortably inside. Yes, that was his excuse.I am too tall to comfortably kill myself.He also considered turning himself in, confessing his deeds, and letting the Royal Academy of Magick punish him as they pleased—which would be akin to killing himself, since if he couldn’t do magick than he might as well be dead. But dying seemed so unpleasant, and in any case he couldn’t put his parents through that kind of grief.
Anyhow it seemed the most obvious—and most difficult—way to put things right would be to retrieve Professor Grimes’s soul from the underworld. And hadn’t Peter always been motivated by doing the hardest possible thing?
Still, planning his sojourn took him longer than he thought. The formula for exchange was the easy part—the Alchemists had found it a long time ago; it was only rarely ever used because no one wanted to pay the price. The gateway to Hell was harder. He had the basic idea, but certain texts containing the details he wanted to cross-check kept disappearing from the library. Some ghost seemed to haunt the archives, always one step ahead of him.
One night he came into the lab just as Alice was departing. She bumped his arm on the way out, but she said not a word. In fact she hardly seemed to register his presence at all; she only cast him a wide-eyed look that was not looking, then hurried down the hallway wobbling under the weight of books balanced in her arms. Chalk was smeared all over her hands and face. And on the hastily wiped board behind her, Peter could see the traces of a summation he’d recently come to know quite well. He recognized it all in a glance.
