Page 69 of Katabasis

As she drew closer she realized the tower base was not built with rock as she’d thought, but sprawled and twisting forms—human faces and torsos, piled upon one another, frozen in their fight to climb away.

Whether they were Shades or likenesses carved in stone, she could not tell.

Arcing round the tower base was a line of rocks balanced over raised bits of dirt.

A low wall, and easily trespassed, but a boundary nonetheless.

She heard a hissing. She looked up.

Upon the balcony stood three deities. Tall sinuous bodies, skin like marble, garbed in flowing cloth of the deepest red.

Great hulking wings protruded from their shoulders.

Alice understood these must be the Erinyes.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, chthonic creatures born of that blood shed from that first broken oath, when Kronos slew his father and cast his parts into the ocean.

One for anger, one for rage, and one for endless destruction.

Dark, curling hair undulated round their faces. They were very beautiful.

All three looked down on her at once.

Their eyes were without pupils; a singular scorching gaze.

Alice felt a terrible heat as they scrutinized her, more intense even than Professor Grimes’s gaze had ever been.

She felt stripped of her clothes; of her flesh and bone.

She was only soul, shuddering and naked, unable to conceal every evil or selfish thought she’d ever held.

It seemed to linger for an eternity. Every thought extricated, suspended, turned over, and carefully considered.

She was reduced to her unexamined truths.

And a deep triplet voice echoing round her skull, demanding again and again: Whose oaths have you broken?

Alice squeezed her own eyes shut but it did not matter; still the Erinyes’ gaze scorched her mind.

She felt so small, tiny and mortal and pathetic.

She felt like she had never had an original thought in her life.

A confessor laying everything bare, only there was nothing interesting to say, only the normal human filth.

I was proud, I desired, I was greedy, I was wrathful—

WHOSE OATHS HAVE YOU brOKEN?

“All of them,” she gasped. “I don’t know—”

LIAR , they three spoke at once.

The heat intensified. Hell faded out into a white plane, upon which Alice could only see moving shadows.

A body spinning upside down. A noose. A heap.

Flames licked around her face. Her ears thundered, the heat sharpened, and Alice heard the Furies cackling, and the burning question repeated until it scorched into her mind:

Why—

Why—

Tell us—

Why?

But this was just the thing she could not answer herself.

She knew she had erred, but her sins felt like they had been committed by someone else, for reasons she could not fathom, and the only defense she could offer was that along every step of the way, from start to finish, each next move had in that very moment seemed the only rational thing.

Grimes died, so Alice went to Hell; Peter hurt her, so she hurt him back.

Elspeth had what they needed, and so they tried to steal.

One thing led to another and that was all.

She didn’t mean to obfuscate. She wanted to be good for these beautiful burning women.

She wanted to confess all, except every way she cast it made it seem that much flimsier, trite and convenient, as if her whole life story were beads knocking about an abacus.

“I was just trying,” she whispered. “I only—I was only doing my best.”

Abruptly the flames died. The heat vanished. Alice lurched forward and gasped, small and limp, a candle doused in water. High above atop their perch, the Erinyes threw their heads back and laughed.

“Professor Grimes,” said Alice. “Is he here?”

The Erinyes ignored her. They shook in their mirth; their great wings pulsing, magnificent heads thrown back, displaying proud, white necks. Come in if you wish , said their laughter. We care not.

So Alice stepped over the wall, and entered the final court of Hell.

The Eighth Court was very quiet. Whatever Shades lurked on the border seemed wary of the tower, and as she continued forth, their malicious presence faded.

She was all alone now. Gradually the tower receded into a tiny prick on the horizon, and vanished, leaving Alice in a truly empty terrain: the river constant on her left, a sheet of orange above, a sheet of gray stretching endless to the right.

She was dazed enough to find this pretty, this geometrical neatness.

Here were three concepts displayed with perfection.

Finite boundary, finite point, infinite plane.

I live now in a textbook , she thought; I am a diagram of the Poincaré disk .

She saw then specks whirling gently in the air before her. Further ahead, more white specks littered the ground.

Birds? How lovely that would be. Alice had seen a beach once just before dawn, while all the seagulls were still asleep.

She had always imagined that seagulls slept in nests; she did not know they also slept on the beach, heads tucked into their downy backs, little white lumps dotting the sandbar.

She drew closer, and was disappointed to find those white things were not birds but scraps of paper.

She reached out and picked one up. Strange, after all these immaterial shades, to touch something so incredibly human and material.

It was modern paper, too. Smooth, bright stuff, with none of the ink bleeding or rough textures that dated older papers.

These were not the detritus of Elspeth’s collection, old unwanted things scrounged from the living.

This was fresh stationery, sourced from Hell.

The page Alice held was blank. Others, however, seemed covered in lines.

She chased another paper in the wind, snatched it, and held it up to her face.

The handwriting was so looping and messy she could hardly make out what it said.

Really the only legible fragment was what appeared to be a table of contents.

Part One—My Upbringing

Part Two—My Pathology

Part Three—My Unfortunate and Inevitable Criminality

Why, thought Alice, these were rough drafts of a dissertation.

They obeyed the structure of a dissertation precisely—the flow of chapters, the slow development of arguments over three clearly delineated sections.

There were footnotes, appendices, and even a dramatic conclusion, with stakes and implications for the field: “Why I Therefore Deserve Redemption, and a Ride Across the Lethe.”

She skimmed one page of the section titled “Part One—My Upbringing.” Her eyes fell on several footnotes professing that the author’s family was of little means, and so he had no choice but to run in the streets and fall in with the bad sort rather than growing up pursuing virtuous hobbies like playing the violin.

His father had beat him, and this instilled in him a hatred of the world.

His mother turned a blind eye, and his sisters mocked him, and his German nanny often sent him to bed without his supper, and this instilled in him a fierce hatred of the other sex.

Alice flipped to the section labeled “Part Three—My Unfortunate Criminality.”

I did not mean to do what I did , stated the author, and then went on to describe his violent crime. There Alice saw quite a lot of passive constructions. My heart was seized with rage. My hand was possessed of a knife.

She let the page drift away and plucked another out of the air.

This one was written in a different handwriting, and seemed preoccupied with the many reasons why women, in fact, enjoyed being raped.

She plucked yet another page. Murder of the elderly is a social necessity, it argued.

They are a drain on resources and annoying besides.

Not the work of a single madman, then. For whatever reason Lower Hell was full of authors justifying their sins, and from the looks of it, producing many failed drafts.

Alice wondered who this was written for, and who was reading, and which divine reader was deeming these dissertations unworthy of a pass.

What would that reader make of her excuses? What excuses could she possibly make?

She continued on until the sun fell again, and then she sat down and made her little camp.

She nibbled a bit of Lembas Bread. She had left only one morsel the length of her index finger, which made eight pinches she could spread over eight days.

She chugged from the Perpetual Flask until her stomach hurt, which was the second-best thing to being full.

No matter how much she drank, however, her tongue still felt like sandpaper.

Yet the rest of her felt deliciously light, a feeling she remembered well from lab days; the days she hadn’t eaten, and was deliberately not eating anymore, just to push the boundaries of how little she needed it.

She knew not to trust that lightness. It was always the prelude to the crash.

She wished she could find any sort of shelter.

The tower was long behind her, and all that lay before her was open terrain.

There were not even boulders against which she might curl.

The best she could do was throw her jacket over her head and take refuge in an ostrich’s logic—maybe if she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her.

She pulled her legs beneath her and wrapped her hands around her head.

Something snuffled against her side. She cracked her eyes open.

Archimedes was carefully arranging himself in a ball inside her shadow.

His fur was scarred and matted; a trickle of dried blood had hardened against his face.

Alice blinked several times, hoping she had not hallucinated his presence; but every time she looked, the cat was still there.

She reached with a palm to stroke his side, though stopped when the cat flinched from her touch.

“Did they get you too?”

Archimedes mewed. His right eye seemed unable to open. His left met her gaze, a hard green glint.

“Looks like you gave them hell, though.”

Archimedes sniffed.

“Made out better than we did, anyway.” She tried again to stroke him, though this time she made sure first he knew where her hand was. This time he let her, pressing the top of his head into her palm. “Good for you.”

She pulled herself to a sitting position and fished some Lembas Bread from the rucksack. The cat watched, unmoving, as she arranged it on a bit of wrapping before him. “Go on,” she said.

He stretched his head forth to nibble.

“I thought cats were obligate carnivores,” said Alice.

Archimedes wriggled his bum, which seemed to be cat-speak for I do what I want .

“What’s happened?” Alice asked. “Where’s Elspeth?”

Archimedes did not answer.

“Maybe we can look out for one another,” said Alice. “Keep watch, and all that.”

Archimedes made no indication he’d heard her.

“Please stay,” said Alice. “I don’t—I can’t make it all alone.”

Archimedes stretched forward and rested his head between his front legs. His rump settled unhelpfully atop the hilt of her knife. Then his right eye closed.

How stupid , Alice thought, pleading for help from a cat .

But it was still a comfort, watching that matted, blood-streaked flank rise and fall.

Archimedes made a little wheezing noise every time he breathed in.

The whole of his little rib cage trembled with the effort, but this did not disturb his slumber.

He did not seem in any hurry to abandon her.

Alice supposed life did survive down here after all; kicking and biting and snarling its way through.

The indomitable will to live. She lay down next to the cat, curling her own torso around him like a fortress, and wondered where she might find that in herself.