Page 84 of Katabasis

If only Elspeth could have seen her! She recalled Elspeth dancing with her spear along the shore, and imagined her own movements now were just as graceful.

This was fun! She didn’t only defend herself from their hacking jaws, she made an art of it.

She swung her blade in the prettiest, most elegant arcs.

The philosopher Zhuangzi once met a butcher who was so practiced in his arts that his blade never dulled; he slid his cleaver through the hollow spaces, where he met no resistance.

This is the Way , thought Alice; I see those hollow spaces .

She sliced so cleanly through their spines she carved them apart in one blow.

One poor runt she bounced off the hilt of her knife and decapitated in midair as it fell.

This must have been how lumberjacks felt.

Every time they swung an axe and wood cleaved in two.

What a pleasure, this tactile competence.

Clean destruction—and the earth cracks beneath your hands.

When she’d dispensed with her attackers she descended the hill and dispensed with the trapped things, too.

She felt it prudent to be thorough. The Kripkes might free them, and then she’d be in trouble.

But the Kripkes were as yet hidden, and her targets frozen in place, and their spines gave so easily when she chopped them clean through.

She thought she read fear in their bones.

Yes, they actually trembled. They could not move their legs, but they could quiver, duck their heads, shrink back in every imitation of living things fearing the whip.

And this might have stilled her, but then she saw layered over their heads Peter’s wan face, and the knives grinding in midair.

She swung. When the blade met their spines, the cracks sounded so pleasing that her delight drowned out everything else.

She had never before felt the high of sheer entropy.

Indeed it felt so good to just make things fall apart.

She wanted it to go on forever—was disappointed, indeed, when she realized her targets had run out; there was nothing more to attack.

Alice stood, chest heaving, and stared over the empty dunes. At her feet, a disembodied skull nipped at her ankle. She gave it a savage kick. It rolled, tumbling down the hill, then came to a stop amidst the carnage.

She’d demolished the horde. The fields were silent.

“Come on,” she panted. Chalk burned her nostrils. She had a wild vision of eating the Kripkes alive; of plucking their heads off their necks and chewing through them whole. “Come on out.”

They appeared seconds later—three figures bounding on the hill, their eyes black, and their bodies encased in armor made of bone.

Papa and Mama and Baby Bear, come back from our vacation.

Goldilocks has been very bad in our house.

Goldilocks must be stuck like a pig. Pouches hung at their waists—wet, full-to-bursting pouches that jiggled when they moved—and their arms glistened with fresh, red blood. Peter’s blood.

The Kripkes paused a moment to take in the carnage.

They conferred among themselves. Alice wished she could hear what they said, because they probably involved some compliments. Skilled magician. Oh, yes, very skilled. Probably trained at Oxbridge. We must be careful.

Then the Kripkes swept through the field.

Alice should have known her silly spells would hardly dissuade them.

And yet, the speed of their demolition dismayed her.

Nick Kripke seemed not even to read what she’d written.

One look at the exposed chalk, and that was enough.

Blood arced freely from his pouch, and he tossed counter-spells onto the sand, dismantling her proofs without looking.

He never broke his stride; even the White Horse Paradox hardly fazed him, and here Alice was certain that Nick had never studied Chinese.

Theophrastus and Magnolia followed in his footsteps as one by one Alice’s defenses melted away.

Theophrastus paused briefly at the two-step Liar Paradox—his feet rocked back and forth as he sounded out the words—but then Magnolia tugged him aside and kicked the red sand away.

They looked up. They saw her now, standing atop her hill.

She saw them clearly too; their rangy, lean forms, their spiked and shining armor.

The top halves of their faces were hidden under helmets made of bone, and the eyes she saw through the dead creatures’ sockets gleamed with sinister intelligence.

They wore identical leers; thin lips stretched back to reveal sharpened, black-rimmed teeth.

Magnolia’s lips looked so vibrantly red, the scarlet shine of department store lipstick.

Though Alice could not imagine where in Hell she found such bright pigment, except in blood.

Primitive was not the word. They had not devolved, like a family lost for months on a hike; they had not lost their faculties in despair.

Neither did they resemble Elspeth, whose piecemeal attire was junk scraps made pathetic, homespun art.

The Kripkes’ armor was flawless, tailored to indecipherable purpose.

They are aliens now , thought Alice. They did not move like humans; they did not think like humans.

They had evolved and adapted to their terrain, become the apex predators the underworld lacked.

Every inch of her body wanted to flee. She had to shout down her instincts with her tinny rational mind. Run, and Gradus will mock you. Run, and you prolong what must come. Run, and your back is to the beast.

The Kripkes stopped at the base of the hill.

They watched her for the longest moment, all three heads tilted left to identical degrees. Nick and Magnolia conferred. Then Magnolia trudged up first, Theophrastus in her wake.

Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs.

Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well.

My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me.

“Who are you,” Alice scoffed. “The research assistants?”

Theophrastus broke away and ran screeching up the hill.

This seemed even to startle Magnolia, for she reached out to try to grab him. He evaded her grasp, scrambling on all fours at an inhuman pace up the sands, growling and yipping as if he were a wolf.

Alice saw a dizzying montage of all the misbehaved children she had ever encountered.

Toddlers throwing fits at the grocery shop.

Cousins over for the holidays, screaming their cheeks scarlet.

Helen Murray’s squalling brood, whom she had once babysat for pocket change.

The younger boy had pooped his pants and pretended he hadn’t.

The older sisters had screeched with laughter and danced around singing that he stank, and the youngest one decided she was a lion and kept sinking her teeth into Alice’s ankles.

Alice remembered how children could be capable of such gleeful destruction; how they smashed and hit things with no care for the consequences; how at Helen Murray’s house, she’d had a guilty, violent impulse to smack one of them across the face.

Most of all she remembered that children were a fright.

.. but they were children —and so very, very small.

Theophrastus ran full-tilt toward her, and all she had to do was scoop him up by the arms and lift him flailing into the air.

He was very light. It would have been so easy to fling him over the ledge, but Alice did not want to hurt him; this was not his fault.

She decided she would dump him in the Zeno trap.

Time out, go to bed, let the adults have a word.

Alice dragged Theophrastus toward the pentagram, tussling as he flailed.

Magnolia appeared atop the hill.

“You,” Alice panted, “are a very bad parent.”

She wondered why Magnolia did not attack.

Then it occurred to her she might use Theophrastus as a hostage.

The child stood between them—perhaps Magnolia was afraid Alice would hurt the child.

Alice was pondering how best to make this threat when Magnolia grasped for her own left shoulder and popped the arm clean off.

Alice gawped.

Magnolia whipped her skeletal arm at Alice’s face. Cold bone smacked Alice across the cheek and jaw, rattling her teeth. Magnolia struck again, and this time the force of it sent Alice sprawling. Theophrastus wriggled free, shrieking and clapping.

Magnolia advanced, swinging her dead withered arm like it was some medieval ball and chain.

Alice scrambled to her feet. She felt a surge of indignant fury. The ridiculousness of it all. Peter had not died in the desert so she could be smacked around by someone’s detached arm.

Magnolia swung out again. This time Alice traced its coming.

She caught it by the wrist and tugged hard.

The chalk dust still coursed through her veins; she still felt a strength whose limits she did not know.

Apparently this shocked Magnolia, for she offered almost no resistance.

The arm slid clean from Magnolia’s grasp.

Right , Alice recalled. This was her advantage. The Kripkes were not accustomed to anything fighting back.

Magnolia drew out her knife.

No, no , thought Alice. She flung the arm away, then flung herself at Magnolia.