Page 25 of Katabasis

A re you all right?” Peter patted frantically at her cheeks. “Alice?”

Alice blinked her eyes open. Peter had pulled her onto the shore.

The bone-things were scattered across the shallows, and water fizzed as it sloshed round the chalk.

Some bone-things were still moving, trying to get out, but their legs came loose at the joints, and their spines disintegrated vertebra by vertebra.

She watched as disembodied fragments kicked, twitched, and then sank below the surface.

Peter grasped her shoulders and shook. “ Alice? ”

She startled. “Oh. Yes?”

“What’s my name? What’s the date? What is your favorite Beatles song?”

“I’m fine.” Alice frowned. She supposed if she’d lost her memories, she wouldn’t know in the first place.

But she at least felt no confusion about who she was, or what she was doing here.

She reached for her staircase and found it.

She was Alice Law, postgraduate at Cambridge; she studied analytic magick.

And Peter was Peter. “Murdoch. Peter Murdoch. Aboveground, it’s—October second.

Third, maybe, I’ve lost track. ‘Mister Postman.’” She shook her head.

“How do you know my favorite Beatles song?”

Peter slumped back with relief. “You listen to it all the time at the lab.”

“But I use headphones.”

“Your headphones are very loud.”

“You should have said something!”

“It’s all right.” Peter put his hands under Alice’s back and helped her sit up. “You have very repetitive tastes, however. I wish you’d put on Abbey Road sometime.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

He stood; she took his hand and hauled herself up.

She felt a dizzying rush of blood to her head, but nothing else, nothing to suggest she might have lost some crucial part of who she was.

Her temples throbbed, but even worse was the sharp pain in her upper arm.

She glanced down, saw the blood tracks and bite marks all down her front, and reeled. “Lord. Oh.”

“Come on.” Peter slung her arm over his shoulder and wrapped one hand around her waist. “Let’s get out of this rain.”

Leaving Desire was very hard going. The storm did not seem to want to let them out.

The winds whipped at enormous strengths, and the rain hammered so fiercely that breathing felt like drowning.

It took great effort even to stand still, for unless they dug their heels hard into the ground, the gusts kept buffeting them toward the doors of the court.

Alice could hardly see where they were going; everything was a howling, wet wall.

All she could do was dip her head against the rain and press forward one little step at a time, clutching Peter’s arm for guidance.

But then it passed, just as quickly as it had come on.

The winds died, the rain lightened; a few more steps, and the sky cleared completely.

Alice could still see those thunderous clouds above, divided from dusky light by a neat, straight line.

There they made camp, safely in sight of the Lethe, on the border of Desire and Greed. Peter got a fire going. Alice sat shivering madly, drying herself until she felt like a person again.

She coughed. “Could I have some of your water?”

“Oh—sure.” Peter passed over his Perpetual Flask. “I don’t have rabies, or anything.”

“I don’t think you get rabies from water bottles.” She unscrewed the lid. “We’ll have to share from now on.”

Her own flask had been submerged in the river. Lethe water had gotten into the Pentagrams in its cap, and it wouldn’t replenish any longer.

“That’s all right, so long as we keep together.” Peter cleared his throat. “So. Now that you’ve had a breather, could I just ask some—”

“No, thank you.”

“But we’ve got to make sure. I mean...” He leaned forward, his eyes huge with concern. “Don’t you want to be sure?”

Alice was sure. She’d been probing her thoughts ever since they sat down, looking for gaps.

But the pain in her skull had faded now, and nothing had gone with it.

Her memory was like a badly locked trunk, straining at the clinch, always full to bursting.

She would know if something had leaked, she thought.

She would have felt the release. “Nothing’s gone, I promise. ”

“But how do you know ?”

She hesitated.

Don’t you tell anyone. This memory was very vivid. Professor Grimes had only said it once, but once was enough. But how else to explain? She did not want Peter splashing about the Lethe, for he was certainly not immune.

It would get her in terrible trouble. But she thought of Peter’s outburst in the Court of Desire, that inexplicable anger—and thought perhaps, out of anyone, Peter might understand.

“I think I’m immune,” she said. “To the Lethe.”

“Immune how ?”

She trailed her fingers against the sand. It was so hard to say this out loud. She had been so practiced at saying nothing out loud; it was hard, actually, to find and then speak the right words. Her first impulse was to dance around the truth. “Well, I don’t forget things.”

“We’ve all got good memories, Law, but the Lethe —”

“No, I mean that I can’t forget things.”

“What does that even—”

“Look.” She rolled up her left sleeve and shifted so that he could see the skin around her upper arm. “This won’t let me.”

He looked. Then breathed in, so sharply that Alice blinked and turned away.

Etched in her flesh, in neat white script in a perfect circle, was a permanent pentagram.

Magick never lasted forever. You drew a sphere of influence, you put an object inside, and when you were finished with the spell, you took the object back out.

The most talented magicians could create enchantments that lasted hours, even weeks in the case of Perpetual Flasks, but you always needed to bring objects back to the pentagram once they’d lost their charge.

What’s more, pentagrams were written in chalk, not ink; by nature, they could not last long.

They were under constant threat from vacuum cleaners, brooms, a gust of wind, a sneeze.

Every stroke of every letter in a pentagram mattered, and the slightest smudge negated all the hard work of inscribing it in the first place.

The best magicians erased their work at the end of every day to prevent accidents the next morning.

It was a massive waste of chalk, but there was no way around it.

Magick was ephemeral. You fooled the world for a breath, and then everything went back to the way it was before.

Professor Grimes had made it his career’s work to defy this one basic rule of magick. He wanted to keep the lie going. And he had proven, with Alice, that pentagrams etched in living human skin might keep their charge for a lifetime. Or at least a year and counting—which was all they knew so far.

Peter stared at the tattoo for a long time. He lifted his hands, and when she nodded permission, he poked and prodded, kneading her skin with his fingers. At last he said, “That’s not your handwriting.”

“No. Guess whose.”

Something unreadable passed over his face. “He made you?”

“I wanted to,” she said, and felt a hot vicious thrum in her chest. Yes, this was right, she knew this was true. “I let him.”

This was how Alice and Professor Grimes spent that summer in Italy.

He had started with animals. First rats and guinea pigs, and then cats and dogs shaved down to trembling skin.

Animal research rules were laxer in Europe; the streets were littered with strays.

Alice spent hours holding cats in place while he worked the tattoo needle over their shaved, bare skin.

She’d been in charge of disposing of the corpses, too; she became familiar with every spazzino collection point in Venice.

But the problem with animal experimentation was that there was only so much that lesser creatures could do .

You could make them run in circles, or withstand tests of hunger or pain, but in the end you didn’t really know how much of an impact you’d made.

Who cared if a cat remembered which cup a treat was in?

Something more expressive would be better.

Something that, at least, could talk—that could tell you what the injection of living-dead energy did to a body.

Whether it felt like nothing, whether it burned you up from the inside.

Alice always knew it’d be her turn under the needle down the line.

Professor Grimes had made no pretensions otherwise.

She had freely given her fully informed consent from the beginning, and in her opinion, that made it all fine.

It put her in control. And she trusted Professor Grimes to do it safely, to do it well.

She was so good, both during the procedure and the night before.

She didn’t let on how scared she was; how she was having second thoughts.

She knew this would only annoy him. When she sobbed from fear she did it in the privacy of her hotel room.

Oh, but she did not want to die. She did not want to lose her mind.

But she kept this to herself. In the morning she was calm, placid, docile. A perfect blank tablet.

She kept reminding herself: It’s been two whole weeks since we killed a cat.

He offered her anesthetic before they began, but she refused even a local injection.

She knew it was important that she keep talking, responding, throughout the procedure.

She had to stay alert, to catalog every part of the experience.

She needed to feel every dip of the needle into her skin, every burn of living-dead chalk.