Page 85 of Katabasis

Alice had never fought anybody. She’d been such a well-behaved child.

The closest she had come was a basketball game in elementary school, when she’d been so furious that another girl stole the ball that she lashed out and kicked the girl in the shin.

They tossed her out of the game for that.

Her parents collected her and yelled at her in the car while she sobbed and explained she didn’t know why she’d done it, she’d never be so bad ever again.

The lesson had been engraved in her mind ever since: Other bodies are inviolable and you do not touch them without permission.

You do not try to hurt or break them. You keep away and they will keep away in turn, see, everyone exists in their little bubble.

So it was a great shock when she collided against Magnolia and they toppled, still wrestling, to the ground.

Alice’s chalk-dusted senses did not help her now.

All she could perceive was thuds and swipes, spikes and sharp edges.

She couldn’t see, her hair was in her eyes.

She swung wildly with her own knife but could not tell if she made purchase.

She thought she hit something, but it could have just been leather, just armor.

She felt vaguely that she was losing. Then she was flat on her back, winded.

Magnolia had her pinned down by her knees.

Magnolia’s knife came down. Alice flung her hands up against Magnolia’s wrist, straining to push the blade aside.

But Magnolia was so strong. The knife pressed perilously close against her face.

Alice’s gaze slid to the pouch at Magnolia’s waist; crimson, bobbling. Two principles clicked in her mind then:

We are in the Zeno trap.

She needs blood to get out.

Abruptly she let go of Magnolia’s arm. Magnolia, expecting resistance, lurched up and over.

Her knife jammed into the dirt by Alice’s head.

This gave Alice just enough time to wriggle forth and slash desperately at Magnolia’s belt.

The pouch popped. Blood splashed across her face—Peter’s blood, rusty and salty and somehow still hot.

The swell of memories nearly overwhelmed her—the Escher trap closing shut, Peter’s smile, the screech of iron—and it was all she could do to train her focus, recall those most basic algorithms. Blood filled her eyes and nose.

She choked and sniffled, all the while gurgling out the words in Ancient Greek.

Magnolia swung her knife down above Alice’s head.

Halfway through the arc her movements slowed to half, then half again, then half of that.

Alice could see her arms straining to move inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, but it was no good, for the more Magnolia tried to move the slower she got, her degrees of freedom vanishing into one divided by squares of two, until for all intents and purposes Magnolia knelt frozen.

Behind her Theophrastus sat completely still, hands stuck midclap.

Alice scrambled to her feet.

The only things Magnolia could move were her eyes. She glared up and locked on Alice, gaze bloodshot and furious. Alice could read her frustration, her condescension. Zeno’s Paradox. A baby’s paradox. But to disprove it she needed blood, and all the blood was in the sand.

“Ha,” said Alice.

Magnolia’s eyes widened with terror. And at first Alice could not make sense of that terror, until Magnolia’s gaze slid to Alice’s knife, and she realized from Magnolia’s point of view, the rationally expected thing for her to do now was to kill them both.

Alice had not thought this far ahead.

In all her fantasies the river had done the work, and she merely got to stand by observing, absolved.

But what to do now?

Slit their throats , screamed the chalk in her blood. But her arm would not budge; the knife would not lift. She could only stand there, frozen in indecision, until Nick Kripke came running up the hill.

He paused at the top, looking between Alice and his wife and son. Calculating, clearly: attack Alice, or free them?

She could not let him choose the latter—she could not fight all three of them at once.

She took a gamble. She turned her back on Magnolia and Theophrastus and sprinted further up the hill, where her masterwork lay waiting, all pieces in place except for the subject within. She was right. Nick followed. She had counted on his curiosity.

Here was the only thing, more so than fresh blood, that could still entice him after all these years.

A theoretical breakthrough, a piece of work he had never seen.

The Kripkes were masters of their craft, but they only had what was in their own heads; all these decades and they had no access to the archives, to strange lines of thought stretching into other places and times.

Here at last was something Nick Kripke hadn’t spent decades picking apart and putting back together, and this was why Nick Kripke made the fatal mistake of pausing to read.

Behind him, Alice chanted.

She read the lines off the script in her mind’s eye, substituting the words “Nicomachus Kripke” for “Jacob Grimes,” speaking faster and faster, before Nick understood what she meant to do, so that her voice was not intelligibly human at all but a high-pitched, garbled wail.

A witch’s howl, Erichtho’s howl—and she was so near the end, only two lines away, when Nick whirled around with panic on his face.

His hands whipped out. Alice raised her arms, but he knocked them away.

His hands wrapped tight around her neck.

Alice choked but made no sound. If she made no sound, then the incantation would not be ruined, and she would not have to start over.

She had only two lines more to go, she only needed one breath of speech, if she could just stay calm and whisper them out.

But Nick’s thumbs pressed hard against her trachea.

She could not breathe. She twisted but found no purchase.

His grip was so solid, the pressure painful, immense.

Oh dear , she thought. But I was so close.

Then a screech, a flash of gray.

Archimedes flew down from nowhere and landed atop his head.

Nick let go. Alice rolled gasping to the side.

Nick flailed, arms windmilling. Archimedes yowled as he clung to Nick’s head.

His paws scrambled for purchase on that bony helmet.

His great bushy tail wrapped with determination over Nick’s eyes.

Nick seized Archimedes by the midriff and hurled him to the side, just as Alice closed the circle.

Now we’ll see , she thought frantically, now we’ll know if I’m a real magician .

Hell fell away.

Not entirely. The spell did not transport them, it only established a link.

They were present now in two worlds at once.

Hell’s sands were still faintly visible, but layered on top were the familiar maroon walls and blackboards of Laboratory Room Nine.

Chalk-dusted floors, persistent mildew. On the floor, arranged neatly within a twin pentagram, lay the fake body Alice had so carefully prepared.

All those grimy pieces, stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster; just enough muscle and bone and ligament to put together a face, all the necessary biomechanics to re-create a voice.

She was amazed no one had cleared it away after all these days.

She’d been afraid they might tether up to nothing, that when she finished her spell they’d be pinned to some inescapable place in between worlds.

But she had been so careful. She’d chosen the basement room no one ever used, locked the doors tight, and reserved it under someone else’s name, a postdoc who commuted from London and was rarely on campus.

And she’d even inscribed some spells that slowed decomposition, so that even though the corpse reeked, it was still not rotted.

Its tissue remained sufficiently intact to house Nicomachus Kripke’s soul.

The corpse’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hello,” said Alice. “Welcome to Cambridge.”

Of course no sound came out. Perhaps she had spoken aloud in Hell, but here Alice was tethered to nothing. She could only watch, a disembodied presence, as Nick Kripke returned to life.

One eye strained open, then the other. The torso flinched.

The parts animated by Nicomachus Kripke’s soul writhed on the floor. The eyes bulged; the tendons strained. He seemed to be in enormous pain.

Erichtho’s notes had warned of this. The soul is wrenched from the underworld and forced violently into a dead or dying body that is not his.

Everything is wrong—every muscle, every bone and ligament—everything is too large or too small and so, so foreign, and he is in utter agony, every nerve in his body screaming, on fire.

It was so hard to read tone in Ancient Greek, but Alice thought the witch must have felt some wicked satisfaction in writing this. Alice had chuckled too, upon reading the pages. I’ll give you a body, Professor, I’ll bring you back. We’ll see how you like it.

But how awful it was to watch that spell in action; to see that ruin of a mouth twist open and emit the worst sound she had ever heard.

Magick was a mistake, Alice thought. These were unnatural bonds, this boundary should never have been crossed.

She tasted bile, a roil of guilt—what had she done, she had to put him out of his misery—but then Nick howled louder, and the laboratory walls seemed to shake and cave in.

The whole room glitched, like a dream world dissolving upon wakening, but did not fade away.

The worlds bled into each other. Carpet turned to gray sand; desert turned to walls, it was all braided in a hopeless, disorienting mess.

But Alice was used to this. She had survived for so long seeing multiple worlds layered upon each other.

Images winking in and out of place did not disorient her; she knew how to move within them.

So while Nicomachus Kripke choked on the horror of life, Alice pulled him determinedly toward the cliff’s edge.

They were so very close now, only several feet away.

All it took now was a shove. The river would do the rest.

The lab room flickered away. This was not Alice’s doing. Nick Kripke’s force of will was immense. Alice saw him straining to concentrate, to free his soul. There was nothing she could do. Her spell established the link only; she had no power to trap him on either side.

Down in Hell, Nick Kripke jolted alert. His fingers closed again around her neck.

“Release me,” he rasped.

No , Alice tried to say; but his thumbs pressed around her windpipe, and she could not budge. Black pressed in at the edges of her sight. His fingers tightened. Her limbs slackened.

Divine grace saved her then.

That was how it seemed, anyhow. It was nothing so solid as a living being; only an impulse, a whisper. Just the echo of a presence. But still that touch was enough to tip them over the edge, into empty air. Onto the rocks.