Page 70 of Katabasis

A lice slept. She dreamed, and lost herself in the specificity of memory: a spoon clinking against a teacup, driblets spilling out the sides that deepened to blood-red; the teacup became a bladder pouch, and the spoon a knife of bone.

Helen Murray’s voice; white teeth, lipstick too bright, smeared over dry skin.

What do you want, Alice? Did you think you were the first?

Alice in a graveyard, dirt beneath her nails; a shovel in her hands, an ache in her back.

Professor Grimes, or at least the pieces she’d found of him; an eye, a lip, a fragment of a nose; all the little pieces on a sheet of wax paper, lined up against a poor pencil sketch; and a nail through his forehead, just to keep it all in place; all the scribbled recordings of the Thessalian witch.

The living face imposed over the revived pieces.

Those shredded lips moved. Good morning, he said.

Alice awoke.

A Shade knelt over her; all silvery smoke, his face very close to her own. She jolted upright.

They regarded each other. The Shade had such a slippery face, features lapsing and shifting, as if he couldn’t decide himself what he looked like.

If Alice had been pressed to describe him, the best analogy she could have come up with was a grayscale mugshot.

Nondescript, fugitive. He looked at her with what Alice could only think of as a wide-eyed hunger, not destructive, but longing, as if he wanted to take her in with all of his senses. The look of her, the smell of her.

Still—and this was her foggy, starved head thinking—he didn’t seem dangerous.

At least he was not warped with that singular meanness of the Shades in Greed, or the suffocating howl of Wrath.

He seemed more human than any of them, more in control of his appetites anyhow.

If this Shade was going to hurt her, she supposed he would have done it while she was asleep, and for this reason she sat still where she was.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Alice,” she whispered. “Alice Law.”

“You’re one of the living.” His voice was like gravel, like earth shifting.

She didn’t see the point in pretending. “Yes.”

His eyes flickered up and down the chalk stains on her sweater. “You’re a magician.”

“Yes.”

He burst into laughter.

“Heavens,” he said. “I have been waiting, and waiting, and now here you are.”

This Alice found vaguely threatening. She pulled herself to her feet, and immediately regretted it; a wave of vertigo hit and she swayed, her vision pulsing black.

The Shade put his hands up. “I won’t hurt you.”

“What do you want?”

“Only to speak.” The Shade veered forward, until once again he was inches away.

He seemed to have no conception of personal boundaries.

No matter how she shifted his face loomed close to hers, as if he were about to lick or kiss her.

“But you, of the living—what are you doing here, all alone in Hell?”

What indeed was she doing? Still she had no answer, and she did not think this Shade needed to hear of her regrets. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Where might that someone be?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I’ve searched Upper Hell. I have wandered Wrath, Cruelty, Violence, and Tyranny. I never found him, and I have reason to suspect his sins were not so light.”

“You think he is in Dis.”

“I—yes, that’s right.” Alice had been certain the city was real; all the reliable archives agreed so; but it startled her to hear its name confirmed from the mouth of the dead. So it was there, so it was waiting. “He must be.”

“And you need to find the gates.”

I have a guide , Alice wished to say, but she saw now Archimedes had absconded; she was again on her own. “I suppose.”

“Come on, then.” The Shade nodded toward the horizon. “I’ll show you. Safe passage.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for ?”

“I don’t mean to offend.” Alice thought of George Edward Moore, mad for a chum. She thought of the Weaver Girl’s girlish laughter. She thought of Elspeth, righteous and vengeful. “Only we—I haven’t had a wonderful time here. And we are in Lower Hell. Everyone wants something.”

Again the Shade rumbled with laughter. He turned his eyes back on her, and this time they became the most solid things about him; deep stone, hollows of time. “A story for a song,” he said. “That’s all. You want to know of Dis. I want to know of life.”

So here she was in the deepest circles of Hell on a brisk stroll with a Shade whose sins she did not know.

Alice couldn’t determine if she was very lucky or very foolish.

At least this Shade—he introduced himself as John Gradus, which seemed an obvious lie—did not pretend to be her friend.

His desires were quite clear. He badgered her for information on the world as she knew it.

He was not at all interested in political or historical developments.

She tried to tell him about the Soviet Union, and he waved a hand in impatience.

Instead he wanted accounts of what brands of chalk were now in vogue (“Shropley’s?

They haven’t gone bankrupt?”), what kinds of foods were then served at dining halls (“Still the same mashed potatoes? Does the Yorkshire pudding still taste like cardboard?”), and how girls’ fashion evolved on campus (Alice felt a bit icky describing this one, but Gradus seemed satisfied with a mumbled answer about skirts and stockings.

How short? She didn’t recall. Above the knees?

Well, sometimes. Not in college, but sometimes.) She didn’t mind the interrogations.

Here her memory came in handy, and she needed only close her eyes, summon photographs to her mind, and recount the details as they walked.

“The London skyline?”

“There’s been a lot of new construction. They’ve got this big ugly thing, the NatWest tower, sticks straight into the air like a blunt.”

“The music?”

She recalled the window of a record store and told him all the names she had seen there. “Judas Priest. Soup Dragons. Iron Maiden. Talking Heads.”

“What kind of music is that?”

“Sort of like... indie punk, rock, that kind of thing? As in, the opposite of Dusty Springfield?”

She could not tell if these names made any sense to John Gradus. He asked, “Do you like them?”

“They’re a little loud,” she said. “But I’m not very adventurous. I just like the Beatles. And Bach.”

“Pretentious,” he said. “The last meal you had?”

“Lembas Bread.”

“No, I mean before.”

“Oh.” Alice rifled through her mind. “Um. Tea and a toastie.”

“What kind?”

“Cheese. Cheddar, I think.”

“Warmed up?”

“No, cold.” She saw the plastic wrapping in her mind, the generic logo. Late-night offerings from a buttery about to close. “It didn’t taste very good.”

“A cold toastie,” he muttered. “All the time in the world, and a cold, congealed toastie.”

He hungered for the tangible, the material.

He became resentful when he felt she had wasted her time above.

Most of all he was irritated about missed gastronomic opportunities.

He seemed unable to understand why Alice did not eat three-course, gourmet meals every day.

The answer “I wasn’t hungry” made no sense to him.

He got such a beady, famished look while Alice spoke that sometimes she felt uneasy; she felt he was siphoning something from her, though she couldn’t put her finger on what.

Living force, it felt like. Perhaps when they were done he would be close to alive, and she would be a rumbling mass of gray.

Disturbing as this was, it was this naked exploitation that, in turn, let her take him at his word.

It could be this easy. It could be the case he truly was taking her to the gates of Dis.

She glanced sideways at him as they walked, trying to make out the face of her guide.

Her own Virgil. She wondered if she could recognize him, if his story was one of the many rumors that haunted the academy.

Was he the demonologist who fed his infant daughter to Azazel?

The cryptologist who sent his students into Faerie without a lifeline?

Unfortunately Gradus had not put nearly as much effort into maintaining a solid form as Elspeth.

If she focused too hard on his eyes, or on his build, his features slipped and morphed as if they could not decide what they used to be.

Strangely he took the clearest shape when she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, when her imagination could supply the rest. A straight-backed and bespectacled man, the sort who might carry a briefcase, or who might offer you an umbrella when it rained.

A man utterly forgettable. You saw him on the train, or in the university library, or at the bookstore.

And then he walked out of your life and you forgot all about him; for shapes like him only existed to fill in the background of your own richer world.

Gradus was a man completely without specificity, and Alice suspected he had worked very hard to make this so.

She tried to place him at least geographically or temporally, because then she could at least rack her memory for mention of any horrendous crimes, say, at Yale in the sixties, but Gradus had been so long in the underworld that he made no references to place himself.

Sometimes she thought she detected vague Nordic undertones in his speech, but otherwise he had that mysterious mid-Atlantic accent that could belong to a Brit who had spent too much time among Americans, or an American who had spent too much time in England.

He was not forthcoming. She tried once simply asking where he was from, and all he said was, “I’d like to see you guess.

” If anything he seemed to take delight in messing with her.

He would make references to Roosevelt and Churchill, then insinuate he’d personally known Copernicus.

Once a suspicion struck her, and she asked quickly, so as to catch him off guard, “Jacob?”