Page 31 of Katabasis

A lice dreamed.

This was horrible, because in the last year dreaming had become a threat to coherent subjectivity.

Dreams were flying-carpet rides through loosely associated memories and Alice simply had too many of them; the routes multiplied infinite, all wish and no repression; in a split second her mind could go from innocent childhood memories to three-headed serpents writhing over crypts, angelic choirs with faces melting away.

Freud had argued dreams were the language of the unconscious, and Alice’s dreams were written in fine print.

She did not float oblivious through vague images; she saw and felt everything, in harsh minute detail; even as those chunks of memory spliced and layered on each other in dreadful combinations.

Not only did she remember every dream with exact detail, she remembered all her daydreams and fantasies too, and so the visions compounded, and new dreams built on previous mad fantasies, and each time she entered a dream the pandemonium had expanded, the demons had copulated and multiplied, and each time upon waking it was harder and harder to reconstitute the real.

That night in Hell she imagined that Professor Grimes, with a horse’s face, abducted her into a series of underground tunnels that he promised led to the lost archives of the Library of Alexandria.

She imagined crawling on her hands and knees, scooping up a silvery-white substance that might have been liquid chalk.

She imagined wielding a pair of scissors; stabbing fiercely at a horse’s neck until black blood coated her face, and licking at the blood like it was licorice.

She woke to Peter prodding her shoulder. She jolted.

“Shit—sorry.” She was supposed to have been keeping watch. “I don’t know how—must’ve—”

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I woke up early. We’d better get going. Cat’s back, by the way.”

“Hmm?”

She blinked around with bleary eyes. Archimedes sat by the fire looking very satisfied with himself, curled chummily against Peter as if he had never abandoned the two of them to probable death.

“Judas,” Alice muttered. “Suppose you wanted breakfast.”

Archimedes mewed and licked the crumbs off his whiskers.

Peter had already warmed up some Lembas Bread over the fire, and even heated water in two collapsible tin cups for tea. Alice pulled herself to a sitting position and accepted a cup of Darjeeling. “I didn’t know you’d brought tea.”

“Just a few bags,” he said. “It’s not so heavy, after all. I was going to save it until the second week, but I thought we deserved a treat.”

“Well, thank you.” She blew on the surface. “Darjeeling’s my favorite.”

“I know. You’re always snapping at people not to touch your tea bags.”

“Well if it’s clearly not marked as department tea, then it’s not communal property.”

“No, that’s perfectly reasonable. For what it’s worth, I always thought it was Michele swiping them. Too many Fortnum bags in his office bin.”

She laughed despite herself, and then her mind caught up and she remembered what she’d seen and what she now knew Peter was. A bitter taste seeped through her mouth. She dropped her gaze.

“You all right there?”

“Oh yes,” she said, and hastily rearranged her face into a neutral calm. “Just tired.”

She kept stealing glances at Peter as they ate. Observing his smile, watching for the cracks.

Part of her wished she’d never seen his notes, for now every interaction with Peter meant filtering through a facade.

Was his affable demeanor just a front? Some calculated jester’s affect to trick everyone around him into lowering their guard?

Deep down, was he just as competitive and insecure as the rest of them?

Or worse: was Peter the most dangerous kind of rival, the charming sociopath who never let you suspect for a moment until they slid the blade into your back?

But how did one keep that up for years without slipping?

Peter was flaky, yes, but Alice had never once heard rumor of him acting maliciously toward anyone.

If anything, he was famously, unnecessarily kind.

Everyone adored him, despite having every reason to hate him.

Bless Murdoch, everyone said. Annoying as all hell, but his heart’s in the right place.

Was it all a grand performance? Had Peter been playing them since the day they’d met?

Alice had spent hours that night staring at his sleeping skull, wondering what thoughts swirled around in that mind.

Who was he? For all her ambition, Alice could not imagine bringing a friend, or even a colleague, into the pits of Hell like a lamb to the slaughter.

She could not fathom Peter’s intentions, and this scared her more than anything else: the possibility that, despite years of trying, she did not know who Peter Murdoch was at all.

She felt like an idiot for sharing all that she had last night. She cringed to recall how he’d nodded along, humming in sympathy, his hand on her shoulder. And all the while he must have been cackling inside. Poor Alice, dear Alice, what an idiot.

It was no accident he had found her in the lab. She realized this now—he must have known she was going. He needed her to go, needed her soul intact for the exchange.

How long had he been awaiting his chance?

Oh, dear God. Now she was trapped in Hell with him.

“Are you doing all right?” Peter asked.

She blinked. “Sorry?”

He nodded to her elbow. “It looks like the swelling’s gone down a bit.”

She peered at her arm. “Huh. Guess so.”

“Fine to keep going?”

She did a quick inventory of her body. Her limbs ached, and her cuts still stung, but it was all superficial. The only thing that really pained her was the anxiety gnawing in her gut, but this she had no choice but to endure. “I think so.”

“Let’s be on then.” He smiled, stood up, and extended his hand. Archimedes stood further ahead, tail swishing impatiently.

“Yes, all right.”

Pretend , she told herself as she grasped his hand. Pretend for your life.

As Desire faded behind them, the terrain changed rapidly beneath their feet.

The campus path became bumpy and riddled with potholes.

Then the bricks gave way to unpaved dirt.

Soon it became clear they were descending a yawning slope, the ground crumbly and treacherous.

They had to pause with each step, carefully testing their purchase before they put their weight on the ground.

At least Alice had some practice with this—one summer there had been construction on Mill Road between Magdalene College and the department, and the whole sidewalk was torn up.

It was a season of twisted ankles. In time they came upon a rift in the ground, a wide abyss cleaving the space between Desire and beyond.

Their path thinned into a perilous strand of stairs that wound down to the bottom and crawled up the other side.

Below on their left, level with the base of the abyss, churned the Lethe; no longer still now, but a foaming, vicious rush.

“Oh, dear.” Peter halted.

But Archimedes proceeded with confidence.

Alice examined the path, and saw footholds.

They weren’t very good, or visible, but they were there.

“Keep your knees bent and your arms out for balance,” she said.

“It’ll be fine.” In Ithaca she had hiked the slippery paths near the gorges, and even on rainy days it looked worse than it was.

You only fell if you were trying. Alas—in Ithaca, they were so often trying.

She supposed it made sense that such a barrier separated the first two courts from the third.

Petty pride, insatiable desire—these were self-centered things, and their harms turned inward.

But from covetousness sprang plotting; sprang malice toward others.

Here, however, to get what you wanted meant making sure others did not get it.

Bhishma said in the Mahabharata that from covetousness proceeded sin.

Saint Paul warned the church that money was the root of all evil.

So here now were the proper schemers; the ones who knew what they were doing, and deserved to pay.

She wished she had thought to bring hiking sticks.

She kept tripping against the rocks, and Peter kept catching her, which irked her, because she hated to still find comfort in his presence.

It was a horrible paradox; the fact of his intended betrayal on one hand, and the empirical evidence that he was still Peter , the Peter she remembered, the Peter she liked.

Worse was the fact that Peter would not stop talking.

He had decided riddles would be a fun way to pass the time.

So far they had done the burnt ropes (you have two ropes that burn down within an hour; armed with a match, how do you measure forty-five minutes?), the Ping-Pong ball (how do you get a Ping-Pong ball out of a pipe?), and the nine weighted balls (using a balancing scale only twice, how do you identify which one of nine balls is slightly heavier than the rest?).

Now he kept going on about some story involving fairy worlds.

“What goes through the glass green door, Alice?”

“Um. I don’t know. Elves? Children?”

“The moon can pass. The earth cannot. Kittens can pass. Cats cannot. What goes through the glass green door?”

Shut up , Alice wanted to screech.

She could handle all sorts of cruelty. But she would not be made an idiot. Professor Grimes had instilled in her a deep horror of ever being made an idiot.

“Fools can pass,” Peter went on. “But wise men cannot. Geese can pass, but ducks cannot.”

“I don’t—oh, hell, is it something about plurals?”

He shook his head. “A stool can pass. But a table cannot.”

“Just tell me the answer.”

“It’s the double letters.” He looked put out. “Simple. Thought you did languages.”

Alice did not have a diplomatic reply to this, so she trudged on in silence.