Page 24 of Katabasis

“But there’s something,” he exclaimed. His steps quickened. “There’s someone .”

The muffled voices grew louder. Peter ran up to the door and threw it open.

Behind the door was an office. And in the office two shades were locked in torrid embrace, their faces blurred and unclear—all facets to their existence unclear and forgotten, in fact, except for bright, red genitals.

Neither took notice of Alice or Peter. One had the other bent over the desk in what looked like a terribly uncomfortable position, but both were going at it with frantic desperation, howling so loud that the sound shook the walls: “ Oh! Oh! Oh! ”

Was all sex so vulgar? Alice stood frozen, staring as the rhythmic exchange seared into her memory—the sloppy, wet squelching, the pulsing and throbbing of organs enlarged, exaggerated, the only defined feature of Shades who remembered nothing else—and then was superimposed on every other memory she’d ever had, every touch, every moment she had ever come close to another wanting body.

All need, compulsion, satisfaction; and it was just bodies in the end, mounds of female flesh served up like pork, Marilyn Monroe’s splayed fingers, Jessica Rabbit, breasts bouncing.

Jezebel dressed to the nines, leaning out a window, and dogs gnawing at her flesh.

DJs laughed and the headlines whizzed. Fucking bunnies, fucking like bunnies, a jackhammer, a sledgehammer, iron into flesh, the needle the chalk and the ink, in and out and in and out, and it all culminated in a grip, a squeeze, a sigh.

Alice tried her catechism, tried to reel it all back, but it did not work, the visions kept spiraling out, it was happening again.

She felt so far away. Her body was not hers and she was drifting back, spilling out.

She grasped for the staircase, but it was not there—

Peter stepped back so quickly he stumbled against Alice.

“Wasn’t him.” He let out a hysterical giggle. “I guess—I thought—”

She reeled back.

“Are you all right?” He reached out to touch her arm, but she smacked him away. Just then she couldn’t stand his presence, any presence. If anyone came near her she would scream.

He reached out again. “You’re breathing all funny.”

She dashed past him back down the corridor.

A terrible wrenching roiled her gut. He followed her down the hall.

She pressed both hands against the first door to the outside she could find and pushed, spilling back out into the storm.

Then the world tilted, and the ground came near, and Peter caught her just as she keeled over and vomited.

“ What do you desire most?” Professor Grimes had once asked her.

They were sitting at a seaside café in Venice, drunk on victory and Aperol spritzes and baking in the afternoon sun.

It was their first afternoon in the city; they’d just arrived from a weeklong hiking expedition through the chalk deposits of the Vena del Gesso with representatives from the Italian Academy of Magick, and now they were tanned and pleasantly exhausted.

Professor Grimes was lapsing into riddles and sophistry, and Alice, buzzed, responded lightly in kind, saying just enough to keep Professor Grimes talking.

She loved when he just rambled, effortlessly profound, without an ounce of self-consciousness.

She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts.

It gave her clues for how to imitate him, to model her life and career after his.

She knew she was silly, thinking she could take up space in the world like he did when they presented so differently.

But could she not at least remind people who her mentor was?

Academic lineage mattered so much in the right circles.

And back then all she wanted, with every fiber of her being, was for people to remember she was his echo.

“Nothing,” said Alice, trying to be droll. “I live the life of an aesthete.”

“Very funny. But what do you want , Law?”

“Success.” She fiddled with her glass. “I want a job, and a lab of my own, and several books to my name. I want your office and my name on the door,” she added, hoping to make him laugh.

But his face was dead serious. “Those are by-products of desire. What do you want ?”

“That is what I want.”

“No, it’s not.” He reached out and seized her wrist; squeezed it with surprising force. She winced but did not cry out. She was shocked more than hurt; frozen in place like a deer in headlights, all senses trained on whatever he did next. With Professor Grimes, she never knew.

“You’ve got to think about what keeps you up at night,” he said. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?”

She was delirious from the force of his attention, and she so badly wanted to say the right thing. But she hadn’t a clue what that was.

“It’s got to be the work itself,” he said.

His eyes were shiny with drink, and uncomfortably intense.

She couldn’t keep holding his gaze; she had to blink and look askance.

“The pleasure of analysis. You’ve got to love cracking things open to see what they’re made of.

These trips and parties are nice, Law, but you can’t enjoy them too much or they’ll distract you.

You’ve got to float above it all. You must be fueled by the truth, and the truth alone. It must devour you.”

“Yes,” she wanted to say. “That’s it, that’s how I feel.”

But it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t articulate it as such.

She couldn’t come up with a single research question that motivated her as much as he expected it to.

In that moment she couldn’t remember why her research, tedious little projects into linguistic puzzles, mattered at all.

And even if she weren’t buzzed on prosecco she would never have had the vocabulary to sort through the complex rush of fear and desire that got her up before dawn and kept her late at the lab.

Earlier that week he had given a lecture in front of the Italian Academy of Magick in Rome—a prestigious invitation, a named lecture that happened only every three years, which many scholars from around the world flew out to attend.

Alice had watched from the first row, trembling with pride as he held in rapt attention the most discerning audience in the world, as words came out of his mouth in such perfect, articulate paragraphs, ideas hanging in the air like shining beacons.

It didn’t matter that she had heard them all before, that she was in fact the one who’d typed them up, organized them into a structure that made any sense.

It seemed like she was learning them for the first time, beholding their significance.

A world of possibility hung before them, and he was its prophet come down from the mountains, illuminating it all.

I want that , she remembered thinking. I want that so badly —but what was that ?

It wasn’t the old need for good grades, or a craving for validation.

She was not a child anymore; she had left this pathology behind in college.

But it wasn’t just the search for answers, either, or the simple satisfaction of a puzzle solved.

It was a primitive thrill, a heady realization of what she could become, what worlds she could unlock, and it was all inextricably bound up in him.

“ We don’t have to go back in,” said Peter while Alice rinsed the bile from her mouth.

She screwed the lid back onto her Perpetual Flask. “Thank you.”

“You’re right, anyhow. I don’t think he’s in there.”

“I know.” She leaned back against the concrete wall, letting the rain wash over her face. Lembas Bread was disgusting the second time around. She felt like she’d swallowed a handful of wood dust. It sat in her throat like acrid, concrete sludge, and no amount of swallowing could resolve the lump.

Archimedes twirled figure eights around her legs, which was just then the most comforting feeling in the world. She bent down and scratched him behind the ears. She wished she could lie down quietly and dissolve in the storm.

Peter did not ask what had happened, which was a mercy. “Let’s just walk around, like you said.”

“Yes, okay.”

“I think it’ll pass soon, anyways.” Peter squinted against the storm. “We’ve just got to get out of the range of the building. Do you think you can make it?”

Alice was already striding on.

The storm felt a mercy this time. It all felt cleansing, the screaming winds, the sheets of rain, and even if it couldn’t wash out her memory, then it could for the moment drown it out, overwhelm her senses so she could think of nothing but struggling forward.

And because they walked with heads bent, eyes squeezed shut against the rain, they did not see the pack until it was far too close.

Movement across the dunes; a rippling sheen of white. A moment longer, and the white disambiguated into all different shapes. A whole pack of bone-things, nearly a dozen.

Peter saw it too. “Oh, Christ.”

Archimedes leapt out of Peter’s arms and took off at a full sprint for the dunes.

This seemed a decent idea, so Alice turned round toward Desire.

If they could just get inside, they might bolt the doors shut, or lean against them—but they’d already come so far.

The bone-things moved horrifically fast. In seconds they’d halved the distance between them.

They were about a hundred meters away now.

“The water,” Peter shouted. “Get to—”

Alice followed him, rifling frantically through her rucksack as they ran. She felt she had to do something , that she could not just stand there while their doom impended. She pushed past piles of chalk— useless— her blanket— useless —iodine, books, all useless. All she had was her hunting knives.

“Do you even know how to use those?” Peter asked.

“No.” Alice handed him the longer one, hilt-first. She’d bought them last-minute at the charity shop; she’d only unsheathed them once. “Would you like to figure it out?”

He hefted it in his hands, frowned, and held the blade awkwardly before him in a way that did not inspire confidence.

The bone-things halted in a line. They seemed much less afraid of the Lethe than their predecessors, for they had come right up to the shore, sandwiching Alice and Peter between them and the waters.

They were of a greater variety this time—some as tiny as kittens, a few the size of wolves, and their skulls cobbled from every kind of animal.

A few tilted their heads in a way that could have been cute; if only there were more than nothing in their eye sockets, if only their limbs were not magically enhanced with claws and fangs from other species stitched into every joint.

Alice crouched, since she’d read once in a martial arts novel that this helped in a fight. Bend your knees, lower your center of gravity, that sort of thing. She felt stupid.

“Hold on,” said Peter. “We might still—he might want to talk.”

Indeed the creatures had not moved. Their neck joints kept clicking as their gaze roved over Peter and Alice, as if processing every detail about them.

Alice wondered where their creator was now.

Whether he was waiting beyond for their dispatch, or controlling these things through some magical connection, seeing through their empty sockets.

“Hello,” Alice called tentatively. “Do—do you understand what we’re saying?”

The bone-things made no indication that they did.

“We’re just passing through,” said Peter. “We’re—we’re alive, as you can see. But we don’t mean you any harm.”

The bone-things crouched, preparing to pounce.

“Maybe we can talk,” Peter said. “See if we might help each other.”

Alice said, “We’re magicians too.”

The creatures sprang forth.

Alice slashed about, but it was hard to get purchase with her blade when the things came from so many angles.

Blindly she waved the knife, and it seemed a good thing that metal clanged against bone—she thought maybe she was succeeding in fending them off.

But there were so many of them, she didn’t know where to look, could only try to keep them from her neck, her face, her chest. Something landed on her shoulder.

Pain exploded, white-hot, blinding. Alice cried out and slashed wildly at the bone-thing.

Her blade hit something by sheer luck—something critical, even, because the bone-thing flopped through the air and landed beside the water.

“Get the spines.” Peter was hacking at two creatures clinging to his legs. A pile of bones lay at his feet. “Weak spots, try—”

Alice adjusted her grip on her knife and took a breath, bracing herself for the next flurry. But she noticed something then. The creature she’d flung away was not getting up. Instead it lay belly-up by the water, tail flailing, back legs skittering like some horrible overgrown cockroach.

She had a wild idea then.

A trio of bone-things crouched in formation before her, as if gearing up to take her head and shoulders both at once.

It felt suicidal to turn her back on them, but instead of standing her ground she dashed up to the water.

She tried not to overstep, but the Lethe’s waves surged unpredictably.

Icy water brushed her ankles. She felt a pang in the back of her skull.

A sharper pain in her upper arm. Memories fleeing?

She could not tell what she’d lost, nor did she have time to probe.

She unscrewed her Perpetual Flask, bent down, and scooped as much water as she could.

Then she spun about and sprayed it around her in an arc.

Droplets hit the bone-things with a loud sizzle. Instantly they backed away. The water kept on sizzling where it had landed. At this sound even the creatures attacking Peter left off and shrank back, yipping and whimpering in unison.

“Yes,” she panted. “Don’t like that, do you?”

The remaining pack clustered in a huddle. The Lethe water was effective beyond her wildest hopes. She saw whole limbs dropping off, joints disintegrating. The water did something to chalk, melted and corroded it so that the entire algorithm turned black, withered, impotent. Could it be this easy?

“Back.” She brandished the flask. “Back where you came from.”

All at once the pack coalesced and flung itself at Alice.

She had only time to throw her arms above her face.

They landed everywhere else; teeth sinking into her clothes, her shoulder, her side, her legs.

Peter shouted her name. Through the mess of bone she glimpsed him back on the shore, hand stretched for hers, but it was too late.

Something sharp nipped her hip. She jerked round, and her ankle twisted.

Her balance gave, and she and the whole teetering mass splashed backward into the water.