Page 39 of Katabasis

H old tight!” The boatman jammed his staff against the riverbank, and the boat pitched accordingly. Alice stumbled into Peter, who stumbled against the railing. “The breaks are dangerous here. Let me get us out of the shallows...”

The little ship bobbed perilously against the Lethe, but the boatman seemed skilled at keeping them afloat.

Alice saw a variety of navigating instruments about the deck—several punting poles of varying lengths, two oars, a steering wheel, and even a battery-powered motor that looked suspiciously modern.

The ship seemed a patchwork combination of punting canoe, rowboat, and sailboat all at once.

The boatman dashed about arranging the sails, then did something complicated-looking with the rudder, until the ship was chugging at a merry pace parallel to the shore.

Then he set down his staff and stepped forth to appraise his guests.

“Hullo!” He pulled the mask off his face, revealing large brown eyes on a thin, friendly face. He was a she. “Welcome aboard the Neurath . I’m Elspeth.”

Alice knew this face. She knew this name.

She wasn’t supposed to know it. All mentions of Elspeth were scrubbed from the department records.

A framed photograph of every year’s cohort hung along the department walls, excepting the class of 1975.

All the faculty liked to pretend Elspeth had never existed.

But rumors survived, passed down from cohort to cohort, and when it came Alice’s turn to receive the secret she could not help going to the university library, like so many others had before her, and digging up the microfilm to find the same Cambridge Daily article with a smudged photograph of that face, stubborn and lovely in profile, dark eyes glaring over sullen cheeks.

Elspeth Bayes. Bachelor’s from Radcliffe, master’s from Berkeley; Jacob Grimes advisee, specializing in maths and logic. All this Alice recalled from the first paragraph of the Cambridge Daily headline. She had died ten years before Alice arrived.

Alice knew well the story. She knew every gruesome detail, etched deeper into popular memory with every retelling, details so chillingly precise that you knew they had to be the truth.

They said that one winter’s morning the Lady Margaret women’s VIII went for a pre-Bumps training session up the Cam.

They said when the rowers returned to the boathouse, the cox saw something dark floating in the river—a trash bag?

A clump of leaves?—just in time to order, “Hold up”—for the rowers to jam their oars perpendicular against the water and park the boat.

Bump bump bump bump. Four bow-side oars thwacked the dark thing in succession as the boat drifted past and glided parallel to the shore.

They said only the cox realized what had happened at first, since only she sat facing forward; that all the other rowers had left the boat and were straggling up to the boathouse before the cox stumbled out on wobbly legs and fainted dead on the shore.

Emergency services were called, statements were given, and since the unlucky cox had taken an undergraduate survey course in applications of magick the previous term, the blue and bloated body was quickly identified as that of Elspeth Bayes.

The punch line of this terrible story, the line no one failed to repeat in a hushed voice over chips and beer: “And the coach said—well, if they weren’t dead before that bludgeoning, they surely are now. ”

An autopsy found no evidence of foul play.

She hadn’t been strangled, beaten, or stabbed.

She was fully dressed, clothes wet and tight against her skin.

No evidence of sexual abuse. All anyone could conclude was that Elspeth had drowned in the river Cam of her own accord, and a note found later in her room, in her own handwriting, confirmed the police conclusion: Tired—I am so tired—and I can only go now into the dark. Tell them I am sorry. Tell him—

But that was all they printed.

Professor Grimes never spoke of Elspeth.

Alice had met several of his other former students at conferences—invariably tall, deep-voiced young men who laughed comfortably with other faculty the way that only young tenure-track faculty can.

They boasted of their time surviving Grimes, and Grimes boasted of their accomplishments in turn.

To graduate from under Grimes put you in a rare and exclusive club, self-satisfied veterans with golden futures, to whom the name Elspeth meant nothing.

But Alice had found the records. There was a time—about six months ago—when she became obsessed, and spent a week going through microfilm of city newspapers in the university library, stopping every time she came across mention of body and Cambridge and suicide .

She had to know if Elspeth’s story was real, and if so, what weakness it was that sent her into the river.

Was she predisposed to suicide—or had something happened in the lab?

How flimsy, really, was the line between each and survival?

The students had their own theories, and every retelling ascribed a different motive.

Failed her viva voce. Rejected for publication.

Turned down for the Durham job. But the news coverage was so scant and offered such vague platitudes.

Tragic story. Fragile girl. Graduate school isn’t for everyone.

“ Ahhhh! ” Archimedes made a happy yowling noise and darted forward, skirting between Elspeth’s legs like they were slalom poles. She laughed in delight and knelt to scratch his head. “Hello, you!”

Archimedes purred. Elspeth beamed up at them.

Alice was startled to discover that she was beautiful.

The newspaper photograph made her out to be severe and mousy, but in person, she moved with a blinking, birdlike charm.

Elspeth was precisely Professor Grimes’s type—slender, underfed, dark hair pulled into a ballerina’s bun—and this identification put a sharp twist in Alice’s gut.

“You’re magicians, then?” Elspeth appraised them. “You’ve got to be. Chalk stains all over.”

“Peter Murdoch,” said Peter. “And that’s—” He did not look at her. “Alice Law.”

“Peter and Alice. My pleasure.” Elspeth grasped their hands in succession and shook vigorously. Her palm was warm and clammy, and Alice jumped to feel her solidity. George Edward Moore would have envied that texture.

“You know Archimedes?” Alice asked.

“Who doesn’t? Here, sweetie.” Elspeth held out her arms. Archimedes jumped up and snuggled against her chest. “So. Ramanujan, was it? Yes. Clever. You’re the first pair I’ve seen who’ve actually managed it, you know.

Everyone always gets stuck on Setiya’s Modifications, they don’t have the maths for it.

” The words rushed out Elspeth’s mouth without pause or punctuation; she seemed unaware she was speaking in full paragraphs.

Perhaps a decade of loneliness did that to you.

Perhaps they were the only souls Elspeth had spoken to since her death.

Her gaze darted eagerly between them, drinking in their faces.

“Journeying to Hell was all the craze during my days. Everyone kept threatening to do it, but no one ever managed it, and the first few years I sat at that bridge watching and waiting for someone to make it over. Five years in I figured they’d just stopped trying. So how much did it cost you?”

She paused so abruptly Alice did not realize they’d been asked a question.

After a beat, Peter said, “Half our natural lifespans.”

“You must have really wanted it.”

“We’re here to—” Peter began.

But Elspeth chattered on. “I wonder about the mechanics. Do you think you’ll age prematurely?

Do you think death has set in now, like a cancer?

Or that some terrible accident will befall you when you’re fifty?

Do you think the ground will just crack open beneath you and the underworld will swallow you up?

” All this she uttered without any semblance of tact.

Alice could understand this—after a decade in Hell, probably tact didn’t seem so important.

“Er—I really don’t know,” said Peter. “Hopefully not the latter.”

“I suppose it’s a bit scary, though,” said Elspeth. “Hitting forty and wondering if you’ll keel over from a heart attack the next day—”

“What were those things?” Alice cut her off. She felt if Elspeth was going to chatter on like this, she might steer the conversation into productive territory. “You’ve met them before, clearly—”

“Oh, I call them little rovers.” Elspeth made a face. “Apparatuses of bone. Set in motion with power beyond me—but they’re scared of the Lethe, as you’ve noticed. That helps. I’ve been collecting spray bottles for ages.” She waved her staff. “This one’s a perfume bottle. Dior. Smell.”

They sniffed as commanded.

“Very nice,” said Peter.

“But who’s controlling them?” asked Alice. “Is it a deity?”

“Oh, worse. A magician.” Elspeth lowered the staff. “Have either of you ever heard of the Kripkes?”

“No,” said Peter, as Alice said, “Oh, Jesus.”

The Kripkes had not been faculty at Cambridge.

Not in their wildest dreams—they were anathema to English academia.

Rather the Kripkes were visual artists and illusionists at Berkeley, where that sort of wild and unconventional magick was encouraged.

Magnolia Kripke worked with oils and watercolors.

Nicomachus Kripke did sleight-of-hand magick tricks.

They were the rare academics who could fill both a Vegas auditorium and a lecture hall at Harvard.

They could, with only black and white paint, create mazes inside a closet that made entrants feel as if they were walking around an entire courtyard.

They could, with nothing but mirrors and light, convince their audience that they’d traveled back decades through time.