Page 13 of Katabasis

“Very helpful,” said Alice. It was clear to her now they would have to decide on pragmatics. If she let Peter go on, then he’d while away the day speculating about geometry. “I think we should go in order.”

Peter groaned. “But that’s such a waste of time.”

“So is hiking to a mythical peak whose existence is uncertain!”

“The peak is a shortcut. The peak keeps us from turning up every stone in the lower rocks—it lets us see everything at once, and then just—I don’t know, jump there—”

“Fine,” said Alice. “Say your peak exists. Where would you jump to? What sins do you think he’s committed?”

A silence. For once Peter had no easy rejoinder.

They were both thinking, then, of undergraduates burned to a crisp, and whether that counted as murder, or just as lying.

They were thinking of Olivia Kincaid and Elspeth Bayes and all the students who never graduated.

They were thinking of everything Professor Grimes had done over his storied career and everything they didn’t know about.

And Alice, for one, was thinking of cold laughter, fingers digging into her shoulder, hot breath on her face, a burning in her skin.

“Well,” Peter said lightly. “That’s just the question.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. They did not want to answer that question. They did not even want to crack it open. To do so would involve a great number of admissions. And Alice, at least, was not ready to make those admissions.

“I think we should search them all.” Alice hugged her arms against her chest. “Let’s—let’s just be thorough.”

Peter looked as though he wanted to say something else. But a moment passed, and he deflated. “Fine.” He closed the notebooks. “We’ll have to move fast, then. We only have seven days. That’s fewer than one for each court.”

“How do you figure seven days? I have twice that.”

“Well, Hecate’s scrolls—”

“Hecate’s scrolls imply that mortals can only last in Hell for seven days before they expire due to bodily needs,” said Alice. “I interpret that as concerns about food and water, and not a strict limit.”

“Interesting.” Peter frowned. “I translated it as the limitation of the soul.”

“If she meant the limitation of the soul, she would have said so,” said Alice. “It’s a distinct term in the Greek. There’s textual evidence from books eight, ten, and twelve—”

“Okay, okay.” Peter held up his hands. “You’re right.”

“Anyhow, since Hecate could not have predicted the innovations of Lembas Bread or Perpetual Flasks, we know we can survive for far longer than she supposed,” said Alice. “You shouldn’t take seriously anyone who’s expressed an opinion on food before the twentieth century.”

“No, you’re right.” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought about texts like this before.”

“What, in terms of close reading?”

“I just mean—I don’t know, taking into account when they were written, and the author’s social context, and such.”

“Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?”

“I mean, if the math checks out.”

“Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.”

“It’s a compliment , Law. I am showing you some disciplinary respect.”

“Well, don’t bother,” she said, though she did feel a stupid flutter in her chest. Lab work used to be like this, she thought.

Peter’s jabs, her rebuttals; two different methodologies clashing until, always, they settled on some compromise that was closer to the truth.

Oh, but this hurt—she had not realized how much she had missed this. “It’s condescending.”

In short order they packed up camp and shoved everything into their rucksacks.

Alice stretched and winced as she stood.

She’d forgotten how much climbing could ravage one’s muscles.

She hurt all over, and her knees buckled when she stepped.

She’d really mistreated her body these last few months; she’d hardly slept, she’d barely eaten, she certainly hadn’t exercised.

She hoped the remaining trials of Hell would be more metaphysical than physical.

She ought to have done a push-up at least.

Peter cleared his throat. “By the way, Law?”

She noticed with alarm that his face had turned the shade of moss. He looked like he was trying to swallow his own tongue.

“I just... want you to know that I respect you very much.”

Alice wished the ground would swallow them both up. “Oh, don’t do this.”

“As well as your bodily integrity. And I am very sorry to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“My God, Murdoch, please—”

“Therefore, I feel—I mean, I think it is best that we do not share the blanket anymore. I will simply bear the cold. I shall not mind the chill, if I am asleep. I think anything is tolerable when one is asleep. And if there is anything I can do to make you feel safer—I mean, that is, more comfortable around me—”

“Murdoch.” She pressed her hands against her face.

How unfair this was, she thought. As if she had never seen him asleep.

As if she had not curled in next to him many times, their breathing deep in matching rhythm, both of them murmuring about stars and numbers until their conjectures bled over into dreams. It used to be so easy.

Yet here they were, negotiating space like strangers. “Shut. Up.”

He did not. “We can even sleep in shifts, if you like. Take turns. Whatever makes you—oh, God.” His eyes went wide. He pointed. “The wall.”

Alice turned. The mass of bones was growing translucent before her eyes.

She reached out, panicked, and her fingers went right through bone, as if the wall were nothing more than a shimmering mirage.

It lingered several seconds more and then faded away completely, so that they were once again surrounded on all sides by endless, gray silt.

“There is no way out,” Alice murmured. This was the opening epigraph to Penhaligon’s treatise.

She had skimmed over it during her first read-through, figuring this was just another one of Penhaligon’s attempts at poetry.

But it turned out this was literally just how Hell worked. “No way out but through.”

This made sense, in theory. Souls that had passed bureaucratic clearance should not get to wander willy-nilly back into the Fields of Asphodel.

It would throw the accounting all out of joint.

You couldn’t just decide you didn’t like being punished and nope back out into Limbo.

Alice should have anticipated this, but still it frightened her, the fact that their paths were erasing themselves behind them.

It made the stakes permanent. Either they succeeded, or they died.

Yet even as the wall disappeared, gray tendrils of mist poured out of the ground and swirled inquisitively around them—darting around their forms as if sentient, as if listening to their thoughts and feelings to get a sense of who they were and what they had come for.

Then the tendrils swirled back into the fold, where they coalesced and spiraled, shuddering as if to a magician’s drumbeat before his great reveal, before dispersing to the sides like curtains swinging open. Here, said Hell. Have a look at this.

“Is that...?” Peter tilted his head up, following a bell tower into the orange sky. “That’s impossible.”

“But Hell adapts to us,” Alice murmured. Penhaligon’s scattered appendix on Hell and temporality had not been clear to her until now. “Hell is a mirror.”

The Eight Courts of Hell reflected the world of the living.

Nearly all the ancient mythologies converged on this principle.

So many ancient rituals were conducted as if in Hell, all the patterns of life continued on.

Mourners put coins under the tongues of their dead so as to pay their passage; they buried them with favorite pets and treasures.

The recently deceased soul was disoriented by his tearing from life.

Hell had to resemble the familiar, otherwise he could never move on.

This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime.

And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines.

And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens.

At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies.

One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians.

Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew.

If Alice had to guess, Professor Grimes’s moral universe—the full accounting of things that delighted him, the things that brought him pain, and the people by whom he could do wrong—did not stretch beyond the Cambridge station.

So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path—just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars.

You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for.

You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings.

You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children.

You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary.

Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here.

These were not places of leisure or business.

These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”