Page 3 of Katabasis
It was the kind of mistake that could end careers.
It would have, if anyone had seen Alice’s name on the lab logs or known in any official capacity that she was assisting at all.
There would have been an investigation. She would have been questioned before a board, forced to recount in painstaking detail her every last error while they deliberated over whether it was grounds for manslaughter or merely reckless endangerment.
She would have lost her stipend, been booted from the program, been interrogated by the Royal Academy, and been barred from studying or practicing magick at any institution in the world, even the sketchy, nonaccredited ones overseas. All this if she did not go to prison.
But Professor Grimes did not generally credit his graduate students in his experiments.
Assisting with his research, at the expense of their own, was simply an unspoken requirement of the program.
No one knew, in any official capacity, that anyone was in that room on the day of the accident except for Professor Grimes.
No one else saw when howling winds torn from infinite dimensions rushed into the pentagram.
No one saw Professor Grimes’s eyeballs stretch out of his face before popping like grapes; his intestines spooling out and around his body like a jump rope, crisscross applesauce; his mouth twisting in a soundless scream.
No one saw Professor Grimes’s body turn upside-down and spin for seven horrible cycles, exposed organs rippling, before flying apart in all directions, splattering every surface with blood and bone and guts.
No one saw his brains on the chalkboard; the toothy jaw fragment landing plop into his afternoon cup of Darjeeling.
And no one saw Alice strip naked in the lab shower, scrub herself clean, throw her clothes in the incinerator, and hurry out the back door, dressed in clothes from the overnight bag she always kept at the lab.
No one saw her flee in the early hours across campus back to her room in the college, where she stripped down for a second shower and alternated vomiting and crying until she fell asleep.
For all anyone knew, the first anyone heard of Professor Grimes’s death was the janitor’s screaming the next morning.
By then the blood and bits had ruined the pentagram, and all the chalk was smudged with gore, so that no one could discern precisely what had gone wrong.
A piece of Professor Grimes later identified as his liver had, happily, landed square on that segment of the outer circle Alice had fudged.
They could only conclude it was a terrible accident, one only waiting to befall the most brazen thinker of his time, and stop the investigations there.
Somehow, University Cleaning Services scooped together enough remains to fill a bucket, which were then transferred into a coffin.
The college held a service. The department maintained a state of mourning for a week, during which all the students and faculty were forced to attend mandatory safety workshops run by colleagues bused in from Oxford, who with every sneering comment made it clear that they never would have been so foolish as to let a researcher explode himself all over a lab.
Professor Grimes’s nameplate was removed from his office door.
His graduate seminar was reassigned to a poor postdoc who understood less of the material than the students did.
The city papers printed some stuff about what a great loss this was—to Cambridge, to the discipline, to the world.
And then the summer ended and everyone moved on. Except Alice.
She could have kept her mouth shut and gotten on with it.
The university would have supported her to the end of her studies.
Cambridge’s Department of Analytic Magick was very proud of its high graduation rate, and the faculty would have dragged Alice across the finish line, one way or another, even if this meant lending her out for several years to their rivals at Oxford.
But Professor Grimes was the most influential analytic magician in England, and probably the world.
Half the department chairs in the field were his close friends, and the other half were so frightened of him they would do anything he said.
All of Professor Grimes’s previous advisees had gone on to tenured jobs at top-tier programs—the ones who graduated, anyhow.
One recommendation letter from Professor Grimes as good as secured a post anywhere his students applied.
Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.
So the next morning after Professor Grimes’s death, once his body was discovered and all the dust had settled, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to begin researching ways to go to Hell.
Peter had a very nice spell-binding voice.
Alice had always resented this about him, how his voice made hers seem reedy in comparison.
She found it particularly disgruntling given how incongruous it was with his stick-thin frame.
It seemed unfair such a rich sound could come from that stubbly goose throat.
Every now and then a research paper surfaced on why male voices were better suited for magick, citing reasons of pitch, depth, or steadiness, and they always sparked a big hubbub involving outraged statements from women-in-magick societies and apologetic statements from journal editorial boards.
Alas, no one had managed to conclusively prove these studies false.
Unfortunately, Alice suspected the papers were right, and at this moment she was grateful.
Peter’s confidence made her confident in turn, and she found herself lulled along by his smooth, reassuring rumble.
“The target defined as Professor Jacob Grimes,” they intoned in unison. “The destination defined as Hell, or the afterlife, or the Eight Courts, or the domain of Lord Yama the Merciful.”
They finished. Nothing happened. A second passed, then several. Then a freeze suffused the room, a creeping chill from nowhere that cut straight into their bones. Alice shuddered.
“Hand?” Peter offered his palm.
She slapped it away. “Shush.”
“Sorry.” Peter’s hand hung in the air for a moment before he pulled it back, and Alice realized belatedly he might have been asking her to hold his .
But it was too late. White light flared up from the lines of chalk, forming a silo around them.
The lab room vanished. A great rumbling filled the air.
Alice reached for Peter’s arm—only for balance, mind—but the ground lurched violently, and she toppled over onto her bum.
For a moment she could see nothing, hear nothing over the roaring column.
She felt a hooking sensation in her chest—not painful, only sharp , like some ghostly hand had reached in and yanked her heart out from between her ribs.
The pressure was overwhelming. She could not breathe.
She curled in on herself, hoping desperately she hadn’t fallen out of the pentagram.
The rumble grew and the light brightened to a blinding white, burning through her eyelids.
Visions of apocalypse exploded in her mind’s eye, oceans of blood beneath tongues of fire, planets collapsing into black holes, and for a brief, terrifying moment she was lost in the eruption, she forgot who she was—
She scrambled for her catechisms.
I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick—
The light faded. The rumbling ceased.
Blinking, Alice turned her hands over before her eyes.
She felt fine. Her skin was coated with a thin layer of ash, so that she looked dyed in gray, but it brushed away easily enough.
She patted her chest. Her heart was in place.
Her limbs were intact. Her entrails still stacked neatly inside her.
If the price was paid, she couldn’t feel it.
All she felt then was a wild, burning elation.
It had worked, she had done it, it worked.
Chalk, dirt, hours of research—and then one world slipped into another. She had wrought this. A miracle.
Peter stood up, coughing. He brushed an ash-covered clump of hair out of his eyes. “So this is Hell.”
Alice peered about in wonder. All around them were gray fields, endless plains under a dark red sky.
A sun— their sun? a shadow, a twin?—hung low and ponderous, its light maddeningly dim.
She breathed in deep. She had brought a cloth mask, in case the air reeked.
In Virgil’s Aeneid , the Greeks had named Hell Aornos , “the place that is birdless,” for none could fly over its foul breath.
But the air smelled of nothing but dust, and the temperature was just this side of chilly.
She’d expected more tortured screaming, sulfur, and brimstone, but it turned out that perhaps the American theologists had been exaggerating.
Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.
She slung her rucksack over her shoulders. A faint dark mass loomed in the distance and there, she assumed, lay the Fields of Asphodel.
“You all right?” Peter asked.
“Never better.” Alice stepped out of the pentagram. “Shall we?”