Page 5 of Katabasis

One of the more vexing problems with a sojourn to Hell was figuring out where to go and where to find the soul you hoped to rescue.

Many souls had died since the dawn of time, and Hell was unfortunately a very large place.

The solution was a Dowsing Anchor: a clause in the pentagram that used a physical token or object to root one spatiotemporally in the underworld.

But Alice’s anchor, it seemed, had led them only into indistinct space.

“I used a token from his desk.” Alice glanced around helplessly. “The plaque they gave him in Paris last year. He tosses most of his awards but he kept that one face out, so I thought it meant something to him.”

“I know that plaque. It’s just made of wood, right? No gold lettering?”

“Yes, only a carving.”

Peter nodded, pondered a moment, and then asked, “Could I make a suggestion?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Only I don’t mean to be overcritical.” He said this so courteously that Alice wanted to smack him.

He never used to mince words with her. He used to shout, You daft cow, Alice, you’ve missed a line, you’ve fucked it all up .

And she would give as good as she got, and point out it was his line he’d skipped, and they would argue furiously, and laugh, and sort out the problem.

It used to be they could quarrel, and that quarrelling was fun.

It used to be they could speak frankly with each other. But that was a very long time ago.

“We’re lost in Hell,” she said. “Suggest anything you want.”

“So Macedonio’s Apocrypha states that most objects from the world of the living lose their directional force in Hell,” said Peter.

“Sorry—I took it out before you had a chance, you couldn’t have known.

But the idea is that the emotional attachments we invest in objects that have been around for a very long time are indeed quite shallow compared to their histories.

Particularly something like a plaque, which is just wood whittled down.

It’s changed by its polishing, sure, but it still inherently just is that wood.

Our particular encounters with that wood are fleeting in the long span of its existence. ”

It all seemed very obvious to Alice when Peter explained it. “I should have thought of that.”

“So your plaque might have put us in the proximity of every carpenter who’s ever lived.”

“I see.”

“Or hiking enthusiast.”

“Fair enough.”

“Or even tree enthusiast.”

“What’s your point, Murdoch?”

“Actually, it’s a very interesting dilemma,” said Peter.

“The way Hell is oriented spatially. Suppose Macedonio is right, and that the landscape of Hell reframes itself to form a mirror against the living world. What happens when those worlds overlap? When souls from different times and spaces interact? What Hell do they experience? I wonder—”

Alice cut him off. This was classic Murdoch; if you let him go on he rambled until he forgot what had gotten him started. Peter was always more interested in the problem than the answer. It made him a great scholar but so exhausting to work with. “Does Macedonio offer a solution?”

“Hm? Oh, yes! He says we should make the dead come to us.” Peter slung off his rucksack and knelt to the ground. “He suggests a sacrifice.”

He took out three objects from his rucksack: a packet of cigarettes, a slice of Lembas Bread, and a tiny sample bottle of tawny port.

“A meal,” he explained. “Something very temporally rooted. You have to get the precise decade right, you see. Objects have long histories, but foods—the particular ingredients that go into them in those exact ratios, and the routes they have to pass to get there—those are extremely temporally specific.”

He assembled the cigarettes in a little pile, crumbled the Lembas Bread above them, and splashed the port on top. Then he struck a match and lit the whole thing on fire.

It all smelled disturbingly good to Alice, tobacco and all. It made her think of the department lounge—of Lembas Bread wrappers, of used mugs, of port-stained couches, of damp coffee filters sitting atop the rubbish bin. It smelled like home.

Thick black tendrils unfurled above the pile and dissipated into the grey. The fields blurred, then began thinning out around them. Whole clusters of Shades disappeared, one by one, until they stood alone against the fields.

A single blur appeared over the horizon, growing larger and larger as it approached.

Peter said, “That can’t be right.”

It was not Professor Grimes. It was the department cat.

Most departments at Cambridge owned a cat, which was to say, the cats owned them.

For the cats wore no collars, nor did they sleep in any professors’ homes, nor did they seem loyal to or even particularly friendly with any student or faculty member.

All anyone knew was that one day a cat would show up mewling with hunger, and since no one could resist setting out food and water, the cat would stick around, growing increasingly pampered until eventually history was rewritten, and the cat had in fact always been a part of the institution.

Analytic Magick’s department cat was a sleek, green-eyed, dark-gray thing with a magnificent feather-duster tail named Archimedes, and to the best of Alice’s knowledge he was unquestionably alive. She had seen him just that morning, batting idiotically at butterflies in the front garden.

She knelt down. Archimedes did not like much to be pet, but he did prefer you make eye contact when speaking to him. Something to do with respect. “What are you doing here?”

Archimedes blinked, his tail swishing back and forth around his legs. He circled round the fire and gave it a sniff. If he was bothered to be in Hell, he did not show it.

“Cats can cross boundaries,” Alice said in a hushed tone. “I read about this! They know the courts, they can see the dead.”

“Can you help us, then?” Peter approached the cat. “Can you bring us to Grimes?”

For a moment Archimedes seemed to consider this.

His eyes lingered on the fire for a long time, such a long time that Alice felt a swell of hope—he did look so wise, his gaze so significant.

I have crossed oceans of time , said those eyes.

I have seen the hidden world. Then he mewed in a very scornful way and streaked back over the dunes.

Alice stood up. “Useless.”

“Look,” said Peter.

Where Archimedes had disappeared, four figures now appeared on the horizon.

Slight, tentative shapes. None with the tall, imposing grace of Professor Grimes.

They drew closer, and the soft light of their faces became clear under the low, burning sun.

Innocent things. Children still. Mottled patches of black spread across their skin like ink stains.

“Peter.” Alice had a sinking feeling. “That isn’t...”

“Oh, dear,” said Peter. “I thought they’d have passed on by now.”

“Apparently not,” said Alice, and braced herself to meet Professor Grimes’s first victims.

Thirty years ago at Cambridge, a spell went awry and four undergraduates died. The postdoc on duty was stripped of his degrees and banished back home to Bristol in disgrace. All involved parties were students of the then-young Professor Jacob Grimes.

Officially, the university blamed the deaths on a building fire—which was not technically false, because the resulting explosion had burned down the entire left wing—and sent the students’ ashes home to their parents, along with a letter assuring them that Cambridge was not in any way responsible, and that litigation would be a very bad idea.

Conveniently an investigation revealed some faulty construction in the gas pipes, which allowed the university to place the blame on building codes and contractor malfeasance, not on what types of magical experiments could burn down half a building in the first place.

All this meant the department was never blamed for what happened. It was a freak accident, nothing more.

But no one ever asked why Professor Grimes let a fire rip through the lab to begin with.

No one ever considered that, as a supervisor responsible for both the intellectual development and the safety of his students, Professor Grimes should have been paying attention to the progress of the experiment instead of being burrowed away in his third-floor office, a formidable “DO NOT ENTER” sign hung over his door.

(He was so proud of that sign; a graduating cohort had presented it to him as a joke, and he had accepted it without irony.) No one ever suggested that perhaps, in addition to doing his research, Professor Grimes should have been fulfilling his duties as a teacher.

He wasn’t the only neglectful professor, after all—all the faculty in the department cut corners when it came to teaching duties.

Why waste time babysitting undergraduates when one could work on literally anything else?

So none of this had any effect on Professor Grimes’s career.

No one could prove it was his fault. You couldn’t draw a line between his actions and the fire.

He hadn’t even been present. And anyhow, accidents were very common in magick.

Just two weeks later an enchanted harp recovered from Assyria put half of Harvard’s department into a paralyzed slumber, and this greatly overshadowed the Cambridge fire on the conference gossip circuit.

(No counter-spells were effective; the cure at last involved enormous amounts of amphetamine, which a surprising number of grad students had in ready supply.) It was generally agreed that magick required taking risks—especially the visionary, field-defining magick for which Professor Grimes was known.

In any case, it was the undergraduates’ own fault, and they were dead already. That was punishment enough.